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.
I just became aware of a bug in Lemmy that (sometimes?) prevents some moderation actions to propagate to other instances. I was getting a lot of reports for posts on /c/twoxchromosomes that I had already moderated and banned the users.
My current guess is that it might be caused by me as a site admin taking moderation action instead of the community moderators doing it, which is quite bad as especially the not actively moderated communities often need site admin intervention.
Not sure what the best way forward for this is, but it is quite serious especially for /c/twoxchromosomes as the misogynists are running rampant on other instances and there seems to be little I can do about it from our side ๐ญ
Edit: seems like my guess was right and the Lemmy devs pushed a fix for this. Hopefully they will make a minor release with it as the upcoming big version 19.0 is still a heavy work in progress.
I would say the best thing to do is to report it on Github and drive discussion into the issue.. I find Lemmy moderation tools to be a bit lacking still... Hopefully they are working on them, as it is an absolute must, specially once a new wave of users come aboard.