Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

• !abop@slrpnk.net by @oppression_abolisher (new community, help them get it started ♥️)
• !smolweb@slrpnk.net - Dedicated to non-commercial, lean websites and its ideals. A concept becoming ever more appealing as the mainstream web tightens the noose with further enshittificiation.
• !selfhosting@slrpnk.net - Goes hand-in-hand with smol web principles. Learn how to self-host your own websites and services for a more distributed and decentralized web!

🌏 World Carfree Day / In town, without my car! Events September 21-28 🚴

World Car-Free day is September 22nd. At SLRPNK we’d like to draw a little more attention to this holiday, and see it celebrated even more widely and internationally. Like all good holidays, it has its roots in civil disobedience.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was one of the organizers of demonstrations that saved a popular public park in New York City from being turned into more road for cars. She was inspired by both the Garden City and City Beautiful movements before her, and her book and methods were internationally influential.

The Netherlands had seen the precursor to car-free days as a response to oil price shocks during the Suez Crisis, and anti-car sentiment has festered due to speeding vehicles in narrow city streets. Late one night in 1968, neighbors in Groningen took pickaxes and shovels to sections of their street to create intentional barriers that cars had to slow to navigate around. Despite official resistance, the civil disobedience movement to create “Woonerfs” or “Living Streets” spread, and in 1972 the first official Woonerf was constructed in Delft.

The Dutch lead the way in re-envisioning cities without cars through the 1970s, but the idea became internationally popular. People began organizing yearly car-free days, with the intention to explore other ways of organizing city life without the use of personal motor vehicles. Car-free days and automobile restraint in Urban planning goes hand in hand.

In one famous case in Jakarta, Indonesia, Car-free day is a weekly event. On Sunday mornings, several streets into the city are barred from use by traffic. They become popular paths for pedestrians and cyclists who come to the city for Sunday events. Initially it was planned to occur only 3 times a year in 2007, but as interest and infrastructure around the event grew, it became a weekly event only 5 years later. The streets used for this purpose have become more pedestrian-friendly as their use by pedestrians grew.

The most popular day for yearly Car-free days is September 22nd. In french-speaking countries, it is called “En ville, sans ma voiture” or “In town, without my car” - but the concept is the same. What ever the concept is called in your locality, we would like to boost it here as a Solarpunk holiday. Check out related communities for this event:

• !urbanism@slrpnk.net
• !utilitycycling@slrpnk.net
• !publictransport@slrpnk.net
• !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net

📡 Technical updates from the servers 🧑‍💻

Not many updates from the technical department, but the consistent memory leak issue returned in Lemmy 0.19.12 that forces us to regularly restart the backend which always comes with a short 2-3 minute downtime (and if we don’t catch it on time it sometimes crashes the database with causes issues with the XMPP auth integration).

There have been some nice improvements on our Movim instance though (OMEMO e2ee and image uploads should be more reliable now, and you can do full-text search in your chats), and we started experimenting with a XMPP server module that added Unified Push distributor support (so that you can use an XMPP app like Conversations to receive privacy preserving push notifications). Movim also added support for small group video calls (incl. screen-sharing), but we need to improve our STUN/TURN setup a bit for the connection establishment to be more reliable.

Last but least, some updates on the planned Piefed migration: The main blocker for re-using the bcrypt hashed passwords from the Lemmy database was resolved in Piefed which opens the path to start doing some testing on how to migrate accounts to the Piefed database. Don’t expect immediate progress though, as time is limited to work on this right now. In addition the Hanubeki Lemmy theme we are using is also migrating to Piefed, so we will have a nice continuation of our color schemes.

💬 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:

Community Wiki - Moderators, you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!

Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)

Etherpad - Collaborative document editor