Every month, we post an update on the happenings of the instance, as well as provide a sort of town square to share news and happenings in your own life.

With January comes a new year, and this time even a new quarter-century! While the last year brought with it many things to grumble about (to put it mildly), this new year brings new hopes as well; China’s emissions could peak this year due to solar installations being constructed at an unprecedented scale, The fall of Assad’s regime may bring a reprieve for Rojava, Unions are forming and growing at a rate we haven’t seen in decades across the globe, and mutual aid organizations are experiencing an influx of new people looking to help due to recent events.

So let us face this new year together, and continue to build up, piece by piece and no matter how small, the world we want to live in.

📡 Technical updates 📡

Not much to report for technical updates, other that we updated to Lemmy version 0.19.8 last month. For the coming month we plan an update to our Movim enabling so called “stories”, a form of time limited micro-blog popular on some other messengers.

Due to various reasons, we didn’t finish the prototype donation page yet, but it will be available soon. Due to the high amount of submissions we also did not yet hear back from Nlnet if our grant application for adding GNU Taler donation support has been successful or not.

⚡Solar-powered servers ☀️

Last month has been again rather rainy and cold at out server location, therefore only 41% of the total electricity needs could be covered by the solar panels we installed in early October. The average over the last three months was 50%, which isn’t too bad considering that these were all unusually rainy winter months. The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy. It should be noted that these figures include the total electricity usage on the site, not only those strictly for the server that this Lemmy instance runs on.

🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪

Remember, this post is also a place for you! If you have something to share, a new community to show off, a thought about the instance, or a story to tell, then please do tell!

Happy New Year, everyone.

  • jkintree@slrpnk.net
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    4 hours ago

    Maybe 2025 will bring an open source and decentralized global platform that can fact check, merge, deduplicate, and aggregate multiple online discussion forums into a shared graph representation that will be able to report on which topics are being discussed by the most people, what sentiment is expressed about proposed solutions to problems, and how that sentiment changes over time. It could become a form of collective terrestrial intelligence, CTI.

  • Fisherman75@slrpnk.net
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    2 days ago

    Hello all.

    Just wondering - why isn’t there a Peak Oil community on SLRPNK? Seems like an incredibly obvious thing to have. I’m getting really paranoid here - I feel like oil company agents try to infililtrate places like this and have stuff like that blocked and removed, and I’m wondering if that’s what’s happened here. It just seems like there should obviously be a dedicated Peak Oil community on SLRPNK. There are way more obscure communities on here than that.

    • jkintree@slrpnk.net
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      4 hours ago

      Peak Oil will be solved by the same actions that are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; transition to solar, batteries, and EVs.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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      1 day ago

      Make one 🤷‍♂️

      But in general I feel the interest in this has waned a lot since peak oil seems to have already happened (at least somewhat?) and the impact was just not what some people expected it to be. I guess it’s complicated?

      • Fisherman75@slrpnk.net
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        1 day ago

        Also, yeah it is complicated. But there is one thing I like to radically simplify it to sometimes that I feel keeps getting lost in the noise : there is only so much oil in the ground, and society does not seem to be properly coping with that reality yet all things considered.

      • Fisherman75@slrpnk.net
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        1 day ago

        Well I thought I’d consult people first. But yeah this is the bumpy plateau is usually my whole thing and now there is all the drama of oil depletion itself sputtering into view.

  • zante@slrpnk.net
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    13 days ago

    Seasons greetings, and gratitude.

    January is the nemesis of the solar punk in the northern hemisphere, so thanks for keeping the lights on. !

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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    9 days ago

    How do people here feel about that lemmit online bot that reposts stuff from Reddit?

    It looks like some user has recently subscribed to a lot of subredits via it here and as a result the “All” feed has a lot of such posts now (maybe 50% of all posts?).

    Personally I find it very spammy to have all this Reddit slop via such a repost bot and if I was interested in that I would just use Reddit. Of course I can block it individually on my account, but I find such a bot also counter-productive for the health of Lemmy in general, so I am considering to give it an instance wide ban.

    Any thoughts on this?

    • jkintree@slrpnk.net
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      3 hours ago

      I would be in favor of a diffy.chat online bot that could contribute real-time fact checking, as long as it identified itself each time it responded to a post.

    • ZeroCool@slrpnk.net
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      5 days ago

      I’ve blocked it already but I would support an instance wide ban as a matter of principle. I’m not using Lemmy for Reddit bot spam. I’m here to share content and chat with people.

      I get that the point was to provide Lemmy users with more content in their feeds but I think, though well intentioned, the idea of using bots to provide content from Reddit was misguided. It’s okay for Lemmy instances to be a small little corner of the internet. Anyone that expected activity levels comparable to Reddit was in for disappointment and have probably already left. So I’m not sure what value it ever really served.

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netM
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      6 days ago

      I used it to follow a couple communities a while back, but I found that it ultimately was causing me to actually use reddit more to respond to posts there, which I didn’t really want. After blocking it, I found that I haven’t missed it whatsoever. I’m down for banning it. 👍

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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      7 days ago

      No objections here. I don’t see it adding anything of value to my browsing anyway.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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        5 days ago

        It has the ”B" tag for bot and you can configure your profile to hide bot posts, but that is really not much different from individually blocking it.

    • technomad@slrpnk.net
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      9 days ago

      +1 from me

      I already had it blocked and forgot about it, and I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything important.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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    9 days ago

    There was an outage of the server tonight caused by a failure of one of the backup drives in the system. It is a bit strange that this caused the service to go down, but it will need to be replaced. It was actually the newest drive in the system, so likely we can get it replaced under warranty, but lets see.

    • cannache@slrpnk.net
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      5 days ago

      funny that, i just noticed that i lost an hdd just a few days ago, hopefully its not all some bad omens… i don’t browse here often since i’ve taken a bit of a break from social media, but i just wanted to say i do appreciate this space o n the inter net

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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    10 days ago

    Movim was upgraded just now. You can find the release notes here. The story feature works, but has a slight issue with it requiring camera permissions and failing when it can’t find a camera on a desktop PC that doesn’t have one. Hopefully this will get fixed in an upcoming release.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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      9 days ago

      Ok, the camera issue was already fixed in Movim and I made this small update right now. It will now show a camera missing sign and a small icon to upload a photo from your desktop.

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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      7 days ago

      And it’s great! Really the hardest part is remembering that we have it to use.

      We’ve used it over in the writing community to share snippets of stories we’re working on.