Hi! I’m a mod at r/solarpunk on reddit, and we’re looking for a better platform on which to host the community. I’ve been browsing slrpnk.net and I really like it.
I’d like to start encouraging early adopters to register an account here. Any migration would certainly be gradual, but before I do anything I wanted to check and see how the current admin and other users feel about this plan.
How’s the instance running? What rate do you think this instance could take on new users? How is your moderation capacity at the moment?
So the quick answer is: yes people interested in Solarpunk are very welcome here 👍
The slightly longer one is: The server this Lemmy instance runs on is currently far from overloaded. My current guestimate is that without major changes the setup can maybe take 10x as many active users. With some optimisations I have in mind for a dedicated database server probably also a few more (maybe around 10k monthly active users???), but that’s about the maximum I am willing to scale it as long as this is just a hobby project with no compensation for my time spend.
Thus if you want to further promote this instance on /r/solarpunk please try to explain that people can also make accounts on other Lemmy instances and access our communities from there. So if they are really active contributors that identify strongly with the Solarpunk movement, then by all means let them make an account here. But if they are only an occasional poster & lurker, another Lemmy instance (maybe a regional one?) works just as well and this helps spreading the server load onto more shoulders (as server to server communication is lighter on server resources).
As for moderation help: yes additional community moderators are likely needed, as not all of the current ones seem very active. Additional site admins would be also nice, but I am a bit hesitant to add people for that role that are not already longer term members of this instance and seem sufficiently trustworthy. For now, the approval of new accounts doesn’t take that much time so I can easily manage it alone.
Speaking of monetary compensation, I’ve never seen you ask but, is there a place we can donate to you?
Not yet, no. And it isn’t urgently needed.
I started writing down some expenses and funding goals here though: https://wiki.f-hub.org/books/slrpnknet/page/donations-funding-goals
My current plan it to set up a donation page via Fosspay (Stripe only) and maybe also an account on Liberapay. But it is relatively low on my priority list. If you want do donate something right now, please donate to the Lemmy developers.
Hardware investments: Second-hand UPS
Leading by example I see 😎
Medium term: switch to a fully solar-powered server Aww yeah like low-tech magazine.
Sounds good, keep us updated
I’ve been encouraging some people of the subreddit, but just as a user. Seems like a good idea to me, it fits the solarpunk ideal too.
It’s a nice instance, runs quite well in my experience (there are federation issues now and then, but I’m not sure what’s the cause, could be the other servers or some incompatibility between versions). Hosted in Europe. Also not too big either, which was important to me (almost everyone is flocking towards a few ‘flagship’ instances, forming new silo’s, which is against the federated ideal).
The federation issues between Lemmy instances are a known issue and largely boil down to Lemmy tripping over itself at a certain size. Since ActivityPub is mostly push based, these too large instance then fail to send federation updates to smaller instances like ours and are also sometimes too busy to accept our pushes (but the latter is AFAIK a smaller problem).
There are some improvements for that in the upcoming 0.18.1 version, but since other admins are reporting some issues with the -rc test versions of it, I have been reluctant to upgrade until the official release it out.
I was hoping the wiki had some answers but alas: https://wiki.f-hub.org/books/slrpnknet
Yeah, I am still working on this slowly. If there was a way to integrate accounts between Lemmy and Bookstack (or another wiki software), it might be also interesting to have a dedicated wiki for slrpnk.net. But right now there is no easy solution for that, and adding accounts manually is easier for me when I use the current wiki linked to the f-hub.org user-accounts.
I’m not dissing it, I was just hoping if it had some of the questions that were asked covered.
The admin of the aussie.zone instance keeps a thread detailing server usage and specs for one example. Something like that would cover the OP’s last questions, bar the moderation one.
You could just have a single post listed in sidebar with a good chunk of info.
Yes, making a “hardware” wiki page is actually on my todo list :)
Maybe to answer OP’s moderation question, we could answer “poVoq needs more hours in the day”.
Problem solved. Good one.
That and your top level answer sorts it all. Hopefully more people come over from that other place.
