Every month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act a town square for the community.
With spring right around the corner, let’s see what March brings us.
🛠️ Technical updates 📡
There is some necessary database maintenance that will cause a few hours of down-time that we previously announced but ended up postponing. We will likely do it this month though. Subscribe to our meta community for the latest updates on that and any other instance specific news.
We also postponed hiding the bot repost communities as this somewhat hidden and undocumented feature of Lemmy is hard to use and the Lemmy devs seem to have some upcoming changes to that. So lets see what happens regarding this, but we still plan to do it eventually.
⚡ Solar-powered servers ☀️
After a rather grey January at out server location, February has started to become a bit more sunny again. So last month 58% of the total electricity needs of the small data-center that SLRPNK runs on have been covered by local solar power (up from 36% in January). Especially the last days of February have been productive, so March will hopefully get us back into the 70-80%.
The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy and these figures include the total electricity usage on the site, not only those strictly for the server that this Lemmy instance runs on.
🌟 A bit of fun 🌟
We should be posting this in our resident !fiction@slrpnk.net community, but it’d be equally interesting as a topic here; Have you read any interesting solarpunk or punk adjacent fiction lately? If so, please share it in the comments! I imagine many of us would appreciate the mental reprieve it would provide (myself included).
To start it off, I recently read "The New Saharan Energy Company, Annual Report 2058” by David McGillveray in the November/December issue of Analog Magazine (one of the few remaining sci-fi magazines still physically printed, with a lineage tracing back to the pulps) It’s more of a punk-adjacent short story, along the lines of Climate fiction, and I found it to be quite a well crafted little tale.
In addition to stories or books, we’d also be interested to hear of any solarpunk games you might’ve played, and what you thought of them!
In that vein, Half-Earth Socialism is a fun little browser game about saving the world from climate change in a post-revolution world. It can be quite tricky to get the good endings, but you’ll likely have as much fun trying to get there as you do succeeding.
🌱 Hold a trowel aloft! 👨🌾
Some of our members have been busy sharing interesting resources about growing some of your own food. Check out for example Balcony gardening. It’s not difficult and almost anyone can do it! For more advanced topics, there is also the Solarpunk farming and Hydroponics communities.
🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪
Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below, your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)
SLRPNK Community Resources:
Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
Etherpad - Collabrative document editor
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I look forward to these posts every month. Thank y’all for what y’all do!
I’m mostly a lurker but I just want to say I really appreciate you guys and the hard work you do keeping this instance going. I’m so glad to be able to use a server that shares my values.
Lemmy has been really slow for me the last week or two. I pretty much exclusively use the connect app on my phone & when browsing will routinely have posts fail to load when clicked on. When they do load it takes between 10 and 30 seconds.
Has anyone else had this issue, or do I need to adjust my set up? Thanks for any ideas :)
Are you sure the Connect app works well with the latest lemmy release? A lot of these lesser known apps only test with Lemmy.world, which is on a much older release.
The mlem app dev just contacted me yesterday because some of their users had issues with slrpnk, but it turned out to be an problem in their app.
That said, yes the database maintenance mentioned in the OP should hopefully speed some things up again.
You were right it was the app :) thanks for immediatly diagnosing the problem lol
Ok, good to know. I hope the app developer will update it to be more compatible with the latest Lemmy version soon.
It might be the app, after work today I’ll do some troubleshooting & report back what I find out
Povoq had to revert SLRPNK to an older, less powerful server due to instability on the new one,and the older server seems to have a bit of delay in some areas.
Even so, 10 and 30 seconds to load posts or comments is quite unusual. On my end, posts and comments load in about half a second, where as refreshing the All or Home views can take about 5 or 6 seconds, and my profile page can take about that long as well.
Does it take the same amount of time to load in a mobile web browser or on a laptop/desktop? (If you have access to one to test)
I thought it seemed excessive. Povoq mentioned that it might be the app I’m using, I’m going to try out some other apps and check if browser or desktop are faster after work today :)
On the topic of fiction, I’ve been reading a book my partner recommended “A Psalm for the Wild Built”. They described it as “happy nature sci-fi, something called solarpunk. I think you’d like it” lol. It’s an easy read, a story set in the far future about a tea monk on an adventure with low stakes and pleasant wordbuilding. It’s very welcome comfort right now. I’ll check out !fiction!fiction@slrpnk.net, if anyone has suggestions for other relaxed-type solarpunk reads, I’m very eager to hear them!
I read that for a book club last year! I thought her take on robots was very interesting and different from most other scifi. I liked the idea of machines being able to evolve over time and have their own personalities. I also really enjoyed the hopeful vibes the book had & was a big fan of having an enby and an asexual as the main characters :)
Also there’s a sequel to it called a prayer for the crown shy if you didn’t already know. Her wayfairers series is also pretty good. I’m reading though it currently.
