Introduction
Every month we have a community check-in, to talk about the instance and how things are going, and to create a space where you can share stuff too. This post will be pinned and we'll check it regularly over the course of the month for new comments to read and respond to. We're really grateful that all of you have chosen this instance, and are making it such a great place to hang out thanks to your contributions. I get a serious hit of dopamine when I encounter someone who's made a great comment in a remote thread, and recognize the username is from this instance. It's a pleasure to admin for so many intelligent, thoughtful people.
Snippets from Last Month's Canvas
A 'Canvas Event' is a participatory time-limited art-form where individuals can alter one pixel at a time, and through competition, negotiation, or coordination with each other, create coherent images together. Now that the event is over, here's some featured results:
Nice job converting @roguecache's solarpunk logo to a manageably smaller pixel version. Bonus points for the neighborhood - the banner is in good company.
Where's Wally? Martin Handford's world traveling scamp is right at home in this visually noisy tableau.
Does this image fill you with unease and confusion? Read the The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and you too will have seen the fnords.
No communal canvas is complete without Kilroy! Graffiti and Canvas have a lot conceptually in common, and Kilroy may be the oldest meme to survive into the digital age. For more adorable rebel art, check out !grasweeti.
We're so consonant with the earth, we compost our vowels! Thanks for giving us even more space to shine :)
Canvas is a reflection of the zeitgeist of the Fediverse, and it's rewarding to see our communities, causes, and memes represented there. Thanks to everyone who participated this year.
Community Highlights: !disaserresponse, !conservation, and !fungus
This month we added three more communities to our directory. Our gracious host @poVoq created Disaster Response, because we know it's going to get worse before it gets better. It's going to be a source of information about getting yourself and your community prepared so you're in a position to help others as well as yourselves. Shout out to @JacobCoffinWrites for the great community banner.
It wasn't too long ago that @Midnight joined the moderation team on !collapse, and has done a great job giving that community new life. They've created a new community about wildlife conservation and protection, you can check it out at !conversation.
For the latest in Toadstool technology, check out !fungus, recently created by @solo. Special thanks to both @solo and @Midnight for bringing so many great posts to all of the communities on this instance.
Welcome New Mods!
As demonstrated by Reddit's decline and Feddit.org's revival, moderators are the life-blood of social media. There are few things you can do that will increase the Fediverse's success than joining a moderating team, and learning the skills to nurture and manage healthy communities.
This last month, a number of new people have stepped up to take over abandoned and undermoderated communities. Check out what's new in these classic communities:
- No Lawns: A community devoted to alternatives to monoculture lawns, with an emphasis on native plants and conservation. It continues to get posts weekly, and @quercus and @LibertyLizard are now the active mods.
- Writing: A community for writers, to discuss writing approaches and what’s new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing. Solarpunk author @grrgyle has taken the helm, and is leading monthly writing club goals, the first one ending today. Congrats to everyone who participated!
- 15 Minute City: an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services is 15-minutes from any point in the city. The new active mods are @vudu and @solo. Thanks to both for keeping this going.
- Art, Aesthetic: @WanderingPhoenix has added @SolarMonkey to the mod group.
- Buy It For Life: @ProdigalFrog has also added @SolarMonkey to the mod group.
- Utility Cycling: @Nemo joins @JacobCoffinWrites as an active mod.
- Podcasts: in addition to !nolawns, @LibertyLizard is keeping an eye one !podcasts as well.
Our goal is to have at least one active moderator supporting every community on SLRPNK. Unmoderated communities can attract spam and abusive behavior, requiring us to freeze or shut them down. Thanks to everyone who stepped up, we love having a vareity of communities on this little instance.
Movim blogs
Our supplementary Movim service which can be used as a federated XMPP chat app and a long-form blogging site now has some early adopters for the blogging feature. You can follow the personal blogs two of our members here:
Any SLRPNK member can automatically use their Lemmy account to log into our Movim instance and thus use their XMPP account to chat and blog. Say hi on our Solarpunk group chat :)
Technical Updates
We did some behind the scenes changes with the firewall setup which will make it easier to identify and block scraping attempts and other such abuses of our technical setup.
Background tasks of the Lemmy backend now also run in a dedicated process, which should enhance the responsiveness of the site a bit.
Our hosted alternative Photon and Mlmyl backends got some nice updates lately.
Open Discussion
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. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!
Indeed, the API for that should be ActivityPub S2S (or the Lemmy client API for personal content) and people signing up for our service have only agreed to sharing their contributions with the ActivityPub network and not anyone that scrapes the HTML frontend. Not everything that can be publicly accessed is free to take for whatever purpose.
But the main reason we set up this advanced firewall is to prevent AI scraping of a git server that also runs on our internal network and which has been repeatatly attacked like this in recent weeks and those scraper bots ignore robots.txt, spoof their identification and utilise a globally distributed network of cloud servers to make IP based blocks difficult.
On the Lemmy side we have not yet noticed any such attempts. They probably exist, but have not been as extreme as those git scrapers.