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
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.