As a matter of community building, lets make this a monthly thing 😊

Community gardening

As stated in our Wiki, we allow members to create their own communities as a way to encourage contributions, but this comes with the responsibility of active moderation. The site admins can’t moderate all communities and unless a posts gets reported, they might not even know about spam etc. Thus we will regularly prune seemingly abandoned communities.

The current list set for pruning is:

So unless someone wants to step up and take them over for moderation and active contribution, they will be removed at the end of the month.

In addition there are these two communities that attract quite a bit of moderation workload and the current mods need support with that (otherwise it might be better to prune them as well):

Technical updates

The originally planned move to a smaller dedicated server was only partially completed and ran into some issue with 8GB RAM being slightly too small for our current Lemmy database use. It might be just a a memory leak issue that should be fixed with the next Lemmy release, but given some related consideration I decided to try use another server with 16GB RAM instead. This move has not been started yet, but I will try to keep the down-time to a minimum.

This server also has a built in GPU that would likely allow automatic scanning for illegal images via Lemmy-safty. This image recognition script is fully local, so no data is transmitted to any 3rd party, but it will likely result in some false-positives (Likely NSFW / child themed ones, which seems not like a major problem for our instance). Any hits will be removed from the storage automatically so this will also protect our moderators from having to deal with such potentially traumatic imagery.

I also made some progress with the account integration between Lemmy and an XMPP/Jabber server. The idea is that you will be able to use your existing username@slrpnk.net ID also for federated chat via the Jabber network. This is more secure than the internal Lemmy DMs as Jabber clients support end to end encryption (like Signal more or less). If in the future some Lemmy clients will add privacy preserving UnifiedPush we can also support that via this XMPP server.

I also started trialling a Movim web-client for it, which besides being a nice chat interface for private 1:1 and group chats, can also act as a long-form blogging site (kinda like Medium or Substack) for our members. Lets see if there is an interest in that 🤔

In theory bridges to Matrix, Discord, Telegram etc. could also be added, but it will need some more testing and might not work out. Voice and video calls will also initially not be supported due to some technical issue, but I plan to fix that ASAP.

Draft code of conduct

I am also still looking for feedback on and maybe some contributions to our incomplete draft code of conduct.

Open discussion

If you have any other topics related to our community here on slrpnk.net please comment below.

  • punkisundead [they/them]@slrpnk.netEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Just wondering: Is it technically possible to close communities till there is moderation? Like no posts, votes and comments allowed but current state is preserved.

    Besides that I really enjoy when I browse the local timeline on slrpnk.net and thats because the communities here are awesome and interesting.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      There is an option to only allow moderators to post in a community, but I think that still allows votes and comments from others.

    • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      I think that’s a better response to inactive communities. Instead of “pruning” them, make them “dormant” (to keep the garden metaphor going) so old content can still be viewed and if in future someone wants to take over and grow the community they can.

      But if the communities can’t be locked down to keep spam and illegal material out of comments I agree it’s sadly better to prune.

      The cost of being a small community in a big nasty Internet. Makes you yearn for the days of walled garden BBSes.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        I can remove them, which doesn’t really delete them and they can be restored. But that also means that they are hidden from non-admin users.

        Just completely locking communities would probably need a change in the main Lemmy codebase.

        Edit: one could make it moderator post only and then manually lock all the old posts.