SLRPNK community discussion - October 2023
SLRPNK community discussion - October 2023
First off, we are still looking for feedback on the Photon & Alexandrite alternative Lemmy UI trials. Please comment in the linked posts.
Technical server updates
Server migration was completed last month and it is generally working well on this new 8 threads, 16GB RAM machine. There is a problem left with occasional stalling of the database writes for which the source has been identified, but it will likely require some hardware replacement and thus a small down-time later this month. But having everything on a dedicated machine allows me in theory to give additional server admins access, but we first need to identify people willing and able to help out with that (more on that below)
Due to active ongoing upstream development the CSAM scanning tool was not yet enabled, but preparation work is complete and it should be easy to start soon.
XMPP chat integration
Still a work in progress, but the auth-script against the Lemmy database is functional and deployed here, so you can already use your regular SLRPNK Lemmy account (username@slrpnk.net) as an XMPP account since a few days. The Movim web-client is also up and running on https://movim.slrpnk.net, but it needs some further testing and a few known issues make it not ideal to use in combination with other XMPP clients until the next Ejabberd server release (Edit: updated, lets see if that fixes this problem). In case you want to use Movim on your Android or iOS device, use the install to homescreen option in your mobile browser's menu (Movim is a PWA with Webpush). End-to-end encryption is disabled by default, but can be enabled in the user settings and works reasonably well. However this feature is still somewhat experimental in Movim and you are probably better off using other XMPP clients for this. Audio and video calls are currently not fully functional yet, and will require a bit more work on our server setup.
Community wiki
Based on our previous discussion, work has started on a community wiki linked to our Lemmy communities. It is already available on https://wiki.slrpnk.net but the account integration is not yet functional. The plan is to create an individual namespace for each Lemmy community to have their own community specific wiki that community moderators can edit. The wiki will likely also be automatically synced with a git repository.
Fedi admin guild
One of the goals of the F-hub.org organisation hosting SLRPNK is to enable better community management of FOSS projects. To this end a new service was recently added that allows creating coordination forums. As a trial, I created one such group with the goal to invite active Fediverse admins and moderators. The general idea is to have a better managed space for exchange and mutual-aid in server administration as well as to make the decision making process for topics like instance defederation more transparent. If you are interested in this please DM me here and I will send you an invite email. I hope that the moderators of the most active communities here might be also interested in this, as it is not only meant for sysadmins.
Additional site mods
I would also like to ask if any of the already a bit longer active community moderators here would be interested in becoming site moderators for SLRPNK. Additional responsibility would be to help with account approvals (not many lately) and reacting to user reports for communities that have not very active moderation. Ideally it would be also nice to have some sort of vote by the other currently active community mods on who they would trust as a site mod, as it comes with quite a lot of power in regards to moderation decisions in all communities.
Open discussion
If you have any other topics related to our community here on slrpnk.net please comment below. Feel free to also highlight some new communities here on SLRPNK you have recently created.
Thanks for all the effort you put into running this place. I can't even begin to understand the technical stuff; I'm a writer and scientist, not a programmer, so I appreciate people with the skillsets and the drive to run something like this.
It would be good to have more general chats/threads/topics. I don't know any of you.
Yeah, maybe someone else should start writing these monthly discussion posts 😅 I tend to focus too much on the technical behind the scenes stuff.
I think @Track_shovel was making you a compliment, not criticizing the Tech-heaviness of the Post.
Let me just add a thank you for doing the good work of keeping this instance running, tech is important to enable the social to happen!
Would you be open to creating and moderating a 'General Chat' community? In fact I was just thinking about the same thing before opening this discussion and could be induced to participate. Where people could leave a general introduction if they like, and where you don't have to be super disciplined to stay on topic.
I could, I suppose, but I'm pretty full up as it is with work, life, and trying to populate content for the two small communities I run on here. I also don't know much about running a community and had to enlist help to get my two ones off the ground RE: sidebar and pictures and shit.
If no one else will do it, then I will, but there's got to better candidates out there.
There was an outage of the internet connectivity in the general area where our server are hosted due to a heavy storm. Our servers were unaffected, but not accessible until the issue was resolved by the ISP earlier today. Seems to be all back fine now.
For XMPP check out our own !xmpp@slrpnk.net community. And there is also a public group chat search engine.
Some maybe interesting group chats:
But in general XMPP is more focussed on private chat, thus the choice of public group chats is not that large.
I also created these two new rooms:
If you have an existing XMPP account you would like to migrate here, please use this tool.
So great you setup XMPP and movim, I love it!
Looks like the people over at db0 are also working on a wiki integration: https://slrpnk.net/post/2723993
And seem to have somewhat more ambitious goals for it than what I am willing to do. Maybe worth a look as an alternative.
Hmm, so I have trouble getting the Dokuwiki AuthPdo integration working. I am pretty sure I got the correct SQL queries already, but there seems to be either something wrong with the documentation or I think more likely a bug in Dokuwiki related to the bcrypt password hashing. I don't really have time and motivation to go on a lengthy bug hunt in mostly unfamiliar code and the little checking that I did, wasn't sufficient. I documented my progress so far, but currently I am a bit stuck.
Thanks for all you do!
Sorry for the short service interruption just now. This wasn't yet the above mentioned hardware change, but in preparation for it, but it took a bit longer than expected. The actual scheduled down-time will be probably around
30 minutes next week or so. Edit: 1-2h this weekend.As mentioned above, we will have a scheduled maintenance this weekend due to the identified hardware issue with the SSD drive controller. If you have wondered why the page stalls sometimes since 2-3 weeks, this is why.
I have an idea how to fix this without throwing away good hardware by moving this SSD that is part of the main storage pool of the database to another drive controller and use the stalling one for less high performance purposes which should not overload it like that.
I expect the down-time to be around 1-2 hours as I plan to do some other off-line maintenance as well (full database vaccuum etc.). Lets see and hope nothing unexpected happens 😅
Maintenance was completed and everything seems to be back online. Lets see if the database stalling has been solved by this, but it looks good so far.
Edit: I think it got a lot better, but it still rarely happens. My guess is that I can further improve this by switching the Pict-rs database to Postgres with the next version update.
Unless anyone has any major concerns, I'm interested in helping with site moderation. I'm currently mod of !anarchism, !abc, !abolition, !documentaries, !landback, and !urbanism. I've been a Lemmy participant since June 2023 with a previous active account @Five@Beehaw.org. I can't guarantee I'll be the most active site mod, but many hands make light work.
Ok, looks like there are no vetos. Lets see how it goes 😊
Bit late, but I'm all for it! I've had a few interactions with Five in the time I've been here, and all of them positive. I was especially impressed with their style of respectful debate.
Awesome! Only had positive encounters with @Five@slrpnk.net
Sounds good to me, but let's see if any of the other active mods would like to comment.
In the end our modlog is configured to show who took the action, so if there are some disagreements on site moderation actions it should be easy to discuss with the person. This includes me BTW, I don't claim to always know best 😅
Sounds great! I really like the idea of having some sort of voting for site wide moderators (or getting some sort of feedback) since it is alot of power & we dont want bad actors doing damage to the amazing server and site youve set up.
Thanks for all the work you do! I really appriciate reading these update.
I'm a big fan of the matrix protocol so I have to ask, what made you choose XMPP over matrix?
Long story, but the XMPP protocol is significantly better designed and the implementations need much fewer server resources and are far less buggy. I know both systems pretty well and even run a Matrix server for some bridges, but I can only recommend to use XMPP over Matrix whenever possible. I also have some reservations in regards to how the Matrix protocol mishandles metadata in a not very privacy friendly way.
Interesting, I was not aware of the metadata issues with matrix. I hope that's something they can solve soon.
I have to say I haven't done much research into XMPP. I'll probably dabble with XMPP at some point when I get the time. I've been waiting for both projects to mature more before diving in too deep.
I'm really interested in a real time communication technology that combines the decentralized peer-to-peer and privacy features of briar with the speed and polished UI of telegram.
I read at some point that the matrix developers want to develop the matrix protocol to work peer-to-peer without a central homeserver. If that is the case then matrix may be headed down that path.
What matrix server do you prefer? I'm looking in to trying it out.
I signed up with the main matrix.org server years ago to try it out. I like to play with the the various clients every couple months to see what new features have been implemented. The element developers just released element x which looks nice.
I have seen people (from other instances) with pronouns in their username / next to their username. How can I set those up for myself?
It's not officially supported, but you can change your display name to include them.
However, a word of caution: since the Hexbear instance enforces this for their users, many people assume that users with it are from Hexbear and/or are Hexbear users using alt-accounts as Hexbear is defederated from many instances (including ours).
Using the stadard web front end: I think there is some kind of issue, "punkisundead [the/t]" works, but "punkisundead [they/them]" doesn't. When I click the save button it loads for like a millisecond and then show sno error message but also does not save the change.
Edit: In photon I get this error
{"message":"{\"error\":\"invalid_username\"}"}
Tbh this is not much of a suggestion but a question. Are yall in any way related to sunbeam city?
No, but if you know someone there I am open to cooperating with them.
Sadly I dont know anyone there ahaha. But you're right, its the reason I asked. It seems like yall would make sense to cooperate, and we need more cooperation in this world :)