Spooky nights have come and gone,
A new monthly thread, but we shan't drag on.
Come one, come all, do join us down below,
Us Admins read every comment, dontcha know.
Share your news, your fun, your most wondrous thoughts,
The server, by the by, lives now upon the cleanest solar watts!

And thus, let us welcome November.

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🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

We have a new community thanks to @CurlyWurlies4All, who created [email protected], a place to document and discuss the downward trend of the tech world as described by Cory Doctorow.

Or maybe you’re interested in how you or your community can better respond to the upcoming changes due to climate change? You might want to check out [email protected], which gathers together some excellent articles and guides on preps, mutual aid, and disaster response.

But what if you have a burning question about solarpunk problems, solutions, or ideas? Something that makes you do the chin grabby thing and ponder about the future? Well why not ponder about visiting [email protected] and drop a big 'ol brain tingler in there! (I’m sorry).

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⚕️ Experts & Fighting Misinformation 👩🏿‍🔬

We recently received a report for a post spreading potentially dangerous misinformation in [email protected], and as the creator and mod of that community is MIA, we had to determine ourselves if the report was legitimate. We eventually determined that the post wasn’t misinformation, but as we admins are not medical experts, it took a fair amount of effort to research.

With how potentially dangerous medical misinformation can be, and with how widespread it is online, this situation highlights the importance of having someone qualified to root out that mis-info on subjects where it has the possibility of doing serious harm. We’ve decided to lock the community to prevent the possibility of that occurring in the future, at least until someone with the ability to weed out that harmful information wishes to take over moderating the community.

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🛠️ Technical Updates 📡

Despite last month’s announcements, not much actually happened so far. We are currently considering pushing back the Photon frontend migration until the new Svelte5 based version stabilizes, but are optimistic that it will bring a nice speed improvement.

We are currently struggling a bit with IP/DNS issues, as our contract with the glass-fiber internet provider does not guarantee a fixed IP (the joys of DIY hosting…). After nearly five years of never changing it, they seem to have made some backend changes and now it seems to randomly change some time. For now, we put an automatic monitoring and DNS updating in place as a mitigation, but this is not ideal on some slow updating DNS mirrors. It would be possible to upgrade to a contract with a fixed IP, but it would require some negotiations as their default offer for that has a lower upload bandwidth. On the upside, it might finally allow IPv6 connections. For now, we will probably wait and see how often this happens and how well our mitigation works.

Our Movim XMPP chat and blogging service has also seen some updates with some bug fixes and additions of “Briefs” as a sort of microblogging feature. This is not compatible with Mastodon etc., but you might have some fun with it nevertheless. The upcoming group video/audio calls are still a work in progress and will hopefully arrive by the end of the year or so. In addition, we updated the Ejabberd XMPP server to the latest 24.10 version, which includes some nice bug-fixes and a few new behind the scenes features.

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⚡ Solar-Powered Servers ☀️

We have not really analyzed our power consumption via the newly installed solar panels, and it has been a bit rainy the last month, so production has not been optimal. By a guesstimate, we covered about 70-80% of the total electricity needs of our servers, with some days of significant surplus but insufficient battery storage capacity. In a few months we will probably have a clearer picture how well it fares over the winter, but so far it is better than expected.

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💬 Open Discussion 🗨️

It wasn’t just a poem, we really do like it when you share with us your news, questions, happenings and thoughts. If it’s about the instance, the fediverse, or anything else you think is on topic (like how you created that new community? You know the one), this is the time to slam it (or gently place it, that’s cool too) down below!

We hope you all had a great October and fun filled Halloween. If we’re lucky, maybe November will start with a touch of Steve McQueen. :)

…I’ll stop now.