SLRPNK community discussion - November 2023
SLRPNK community discussion - November 2023
Introduction
Greetings everybody! Slrpnk.net now has two Admins! On the 16th of October @poVoq gave me admin privileges, and I'm now involved in approving applications, responding to report tickets, and coordinating with other instance administrators. Your main admin is continuing to do those things as well, in addition to sysadmin tasks and technology improvements, and we are coordinating over XMPP to keep our actions consistent and in line with Slrpnk's values. Thank you @ProdigalFrog and @punkisundead for your warm endorsements, your support means a lot to me.
XMPP chat integration
As mentioned last month, Slrpnk.net is running an Ejabberd service. Movim.Slrpnk.net hosts a web-client you can use with your current username and password. After logging in to the Movim client, your XMPP account will be active, and you can access Slrpnk chat with any XMPP compatible Android or Apple client. You can find a list of suggested clients at joinjabber.org. Cheogram from F-Droid is a recommended choice.
Audio and video calls are still not fully functional yet, but we've been experimenting extensively with the chat options, and it has been invaluable for coordinating administrative activities. In addition to directly chatting with other users, there are public chat rooms, and you can create invite-only private rooms. The interface is not bug-free, but we've had direct help from the author in troubleshooting problems and fixing bugs. Thanks @edhelas@slrpnk.net!
Everyone is encouraged to join, but especially moderators who share communities. We've created an invite room for all moderators moderators@chat.slrpnk.net, and when demand requires, rooms for each community like "mod-memes" and "mod-anarchism" are available for community-specific coordination.
Call for moderators
We've noticed a rise in spam - this is good news as it is an indication of the Threadiverse's rising popularity, though it is of course also a challenge. There has also been a rise in hate speech and genocidal language due to recent tragic events. Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims are all people deserving of dignity and respect, and are all explicitly welcome here. I'm proud of the inter-admin solidarity particularly with Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org in responding to reports. I'm also proud of all of you who have participated in discussions, flagged spam and hate speech for us, and shown humanity to others in this trying time. You are an inspiration to me.
To grow and become better, we need people to mod. If you enjoy posting in a community, consider asking the owner of the community if you can help mod; if you're a moderator and you notice a person who you think would be a good moderator, don't be afraid to ask them to join you. If you're already a mod, consider reaching out to other mods to help them with their communities. Our Lemmy feature requests are improvements to the moderation tools, and the XMPP chat significantly improves the ease of inter-moderator coordination. More mods in a community usually means overlapping coverage when there's a diversity of time-zones and sleep schedules, and is a great opportunity to get to know other members of the community and learn social custodial skills from each other.
Fedi-Admin Guild
Since @poVoq announced it last month, we've added admins from four other Lemmy instances to the Fedi-admin guild, with a fifth likely to join soon. The guild runs on the open-source forum software Loomio, which is designed to facilitate online decision-making. It was designed for community governance, and though it is still a work in progress, the developers have been very responsive. If you're looking for another reason to volunteer as a mod, access is still open to you even if you're not an admin. Both Lemmy and Loomio are fascinating software concepts, if you're curious about that sort of thing, I think you'll like learning the features and seeing the clockwork.
I'm a big fan of the guild initiative as a form of prefigurative politics and for its potential for improving the general Threadiverse stability and performance. It's also an opportunity to build consensus on community norms in this new form of social technology we're all building together.
No UI change this month
We're sticking with the default Lemmy UI for at least another month. You can continue to experience site navigation in Photon and Alexandrite. There's a feedback post for Photon, and the developer, @Xylight@lemmy.world, is active in the threads. There's also an Alexandrite feedback post.
Open discussion
This is the monthly meta thread, it's now your turn to tell us what's new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you've created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. Got questions? Ask'em!
Very cool to see the slow and steady development of this instance (I mean slow as a compliment, as I've never seen anything rushed get to anywhere good). I'm finding interesting and relevant content, and (save very few exceptions) a really civilized, supportive and engaging discussion culture. And a place for my tiny weird communities. Occasional tech support. What more to ask for. Everybody is doing a great job in here keeping the true spirit of the internet alive.
@Five Thanks for helping with the admin work!
The culture here really is something special. Its a breath of fresh air compared to most places I've been on the net, and that alone is quite compelling to keep me coming back.
I'm sure you'll be a great admin
There is currently a login issue with the xmpp server, but I am traveling and the internet is so slow here that I can't reliably connect to the server and fix it. Hopefully in a few hours.
Edit: fixed for now. Let's hope it doesn't happen again.
Congrats on stepping up to moderation team! I'm really happy that Photon UI is available, hands down best UI at this moment for Lemmy. Very enjoyable experience overall on Slrpnk.net!
Hi!
I'm new here and have no business telling anyone how to do anything.
That said, every time I see the description for the !climate community I get a bit twitchy. It says "truthful information about climate, related activism, and politics". One thing that's become clear living in this post-truth world is that "true" can be very difficult to nail down.
I guess a single statement can be true as in "today is Thursday" but information can never really be a complete truth because for complex concepts, particularly climate change, we just don't have all the details (although we have enough data to draw conclusions confidently).
Another issue is, there can be multiple perspectives of the truth. People with different predispositions can form different conclusions from the same facts.
I guess I'm wondering what others think about the term "truthful" and whether there might be a better alternative like "authoritative" or "reliable" or some term that doesn't have the same baggage.
Regardless, it's not my intention to be critical. Go team!
I would up using that language because of a history of reddit having several communities dedicated to promoting falsehoods about climate. I'm very much aware of the limitations of both my knowledge and human knowledge.
I suppose it helps to qualify what you say. But then it may become quite unreadable.
Even "Today is Thursday" is questionable. Where is it today? Do you mean right now, right here? What calendar? Somewhere it's already Friday. The "day" is just rolling around the earth, etc. It's more defensible to say at the time of posting this it is Thursday in California.
The philosophy people have a thing where you posit a thesis and then present counter arguments, and then counter these again (and, in medival time, counter the ones that are non-dogmatic once again to make sure you don't get burned alive).
The Chinese had a seven legged essay, I think it went back and forth 7 times, and the conclusion was left up to the educated reader, in contrast to scientific paper standard today where we explicitly state the conclusion.
Exploring and to some extent preempting counterarguments may be helpful in any case.
Happy to see everything is still growing here and elsewhere on lemmy, and it's awesome to hear there's healthy collaboration between instances.
Congratulations on becoming an admin @Five ! I'm glad to have someone like you watching over the community 😄
I've never tried XMPP before, I'll definitely join up at some point and say hello. I imagine that would be a good place to start a 'town square' equivalent.
Thank you for all the time and effort you guys put into this community!
Sorry for the end of the month post here but I wanted to say welcome aboard! Would love to connect with both of you about how I can assist with any moderation issues and stay on the same page. Also, I tried logging into the xmpp server and I keep getting a notification that "server is taking too long to respond". I assume any xmpp account I already have wouldn't work in any slrpnk chats.
Currently there are some issues with the Movim instance as a result of the recent server trouble. I'll fix it this weekend.
The main solarpunk@chat.slrpnk.net channel is public and you can join it with any federated xmpp account. If you share your JID there we can invite you to one of the moderator channels.
But try your already existing "steveklord@slrpnk.net" xmpp account with another xmpp client. It should work fine.
Thanks for the info. I just tried the public chat with my account on the Monal client, again, and it says "invalid Jid" so I'll see if I can troubleshoot. Thanks for the heads up. I'll see if I can use that xmpp account with that client. I thought I had to activate it first and when I tried through the web I had issues but I'm sure they'll find a resolution.
I'm having trouble joining xmpp.
at movim.slrpnk.net I get an error - a dialog appears which says "the server takes too long to respond" or some such.
I've tried other clients, but I'm not sure of the server - is it chat.slrpnk.net ?
🤔 I hope it isn't an issue with your username being too long or so...
Did you try it with "fine_sandy_bottom@slrpnk.net"? I think it will autocomplete the "@slrpnk.net" if you don't include it.
Chat.slrpnk.netis the subdomain for group chats only, do not use it for login. Just use the slrpnk.net root domain for login.great, thanks, this sorted it. thankyou.
Are you using the web client, or a chat app? You may need to log in first via the web client before you can connect with a mobile client.
I was trying to log in with the web client which didn't work.
I may have been using the wrong server though.
I took a break from Lemmy for a couple months afte a rise of rightwing rhetoric went unchecked thanks to the lack of proper moderating tools. How are things going these days?
I've never really noticed much of that personally, but then again, our All tab is essentially pre-filtered from our userbase, so it's been pretty clean when I venture there. I usually stick to my local and subscribed tabs, which have offered an excellent experience.