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.
π‘ Technical updates π‘
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.
β‘Solar-powered servers βοΈ
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.
π£οΈ Open Discussion πͺ
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.
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?
Yeah one of the first things I did when I made this account is block that lemmit online bot. Looking at the 3 biggest instances:
Iβve blocked it already but I would support an instance wide ban as a matter of principle. Iβm not using Lemmy for Reddit bot spam. Iβm 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. Itβs 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 Iβm not sure what value it ever really served.
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. π
No objections here. I don't see it adding anything of value to my browsing anyway.
Meh, maybe a bot 'tag' would help
It has the βB" tag for bot and you can configure your profile to hide bot posts, but that is really not much different from individually blocking it.
+1 from me
I already had it blocked and forgot about it, and I don't really feel like I'm missing anything important.