As a matter of community building, lets make this a monthly thing ๐
Community gardening
As stated in our Wiki, we allow members to create their own communities as a way to encourage contributions, but this comes with the responsibility of active moderation. The site admins can't moderate all communities and unless a posts gets reported, they might not even know about spam etc. Thus we will regularly prune seemingly abandoned communities.
The current list set for pruning is:
- ~~Buy it for life~~ volunteer found
- Dumpster Diving <- removed
- OpenSourceEcology <- removed
- ~~Rat Zone~~ volunteer found
- ~~Board games~~ volunteer found
- Solar Powered Vehicles <- removed
So unless someone wants to step up and take them over for moderation and active contribution, they will be removed at the end of the month.
In addition there are these two communities that attract quite a bit of moderation workload and the current mods need support with that (otherwise it might be better to prune them as well):
Technical updates
The originally planned move to a smaller dedicated server was only partially completed and ran into some issue with 8GB RAM being slightly too small for our current Lemmy database use. It might be just a a memory leak issue that should be fixed with the next Lemmy release, but given some related consideration I decided to try use another server with 16GB RAM instead. This move has not been started yet, but I will try to keep the down-time to a minimum.
This server also has a built in GPU that would likely allow automatic scanning for illegal images via Lemmy-safty. This image recognition script is fully local, so no data is transmitted to any 3rd party, but it will likely result in some false-positives (Likely NSFW / child themed ones, which seems not like a major problem for our instance). Any hits will be removed from the storage automatically so this will also protect our moderators from having to deal with such potentially traumatic imagery.
I also made some progress with the account integration between Lemmy and an XMPP/Jabber server. The idea is that you will be able to use your existing username@slrpnk.net ID also for federated chat via the Jabber network. This is more secure than the internal Lemmy DMs as Jabber clients support end to end encryption (like Signal more or less). If in the future some Lemmy clients will add privacy preserving UnifiedPush we can also support that via this XMPP server.
I also started trialling a Movim web-client for it, which besides being a nice chat interface for private 1:1 and group chats, can also act as a long-form blogging site (kinda like Medium or Substack) for our members. Lets see if there is an interest in that ๐ค
In theory bridges to Matrix, Discord, Telegram etc. could also be added, but it will need some more testing and might not work out. Voice and video calls will also initially not be supported due to some technical issue, but I plan to fix that ASAP.
Draft code of conduct
I am also still looking for feedback on and maybe some contributions to our incomplete draft code of conduct.
Open discussion
If you have any other topics related to our community here on slrpnk.net please comment below.
In my experience e2ee in XMPP is less wonky than Matrix, but its higher security level (much more similar to Signal than what Matrix does) comes with some trade-offs that could seem wonky. For example you can't do e2ee in large XMPP group-chats (which does work, albeit very wonky in Matrix), but IMHO in a large group chat where you can't vet all members, e2ee makes little sense (and of course it still is always TLS encrypted).
For what it's worth, this is a long rabbithole on the whole e2ee thing so just in short:
From what I gathered poking around in the past XMPP's OMEMO seems to have had shakier protocol design often leading to silently lost messages if you use multiple devices (I asked around among devs what it actually did and why, would take a while to explain) while Matrix usually has noisily lost messages so you can try to resend. So since that happened to me I've abandoned XMPP personally, I wouldn't know why these differences existed or whether it was fixed since then.
(Regarding group chats, I also think e2ee is still useful there, can limit leaks a little if you use history since joining and ban leakers if possible.)