I have heard of the migration to Piefed, but will it remove the (very cool) aesthetics of the lemmy ? I loved it :'(
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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I think we will try to come up with a theme for Piefed with similar colors.
yayyy :D
Found this post after a couple of days of hopeful reloading of the page! Took another couple of days to log in an old alt just to say I'm glad you communicated this, and let us know how we can help to make it more resilient (if at all necessary).
To the kind soul that was helping me with my greenhouse infested ants (in the unlikely event they are reading here - but iirc they were not from slrpnk.net but just passing by) I'm glad we spoke, it seems like they are harmlessly using my panels for hatching, and then moving on! Related, who has a nice gardening/greenhouse community to suggest? :)
Thanks for letting us know what is going on.
Sorry that it took so long to get the word out. I guess we relied a bit too much on the xmpp server for internal communication.
Even the big operations break in unexpected ways. Facebook accidentally broke the authentication for their door locks when they took the site down a few years back and had to fly people to a datacenter and break down a door to get to servers and restart things.
We managed to resolve the issue and I have many ideas how to avoid this in the future π€
I this itβs a law that servers run 100% perfect until the literal day one leaves town with zero way to return home. One of the many reasons I got all my services off of unraid.
Very cool to learn youβre running your own machines. Do you go into detail about this anywhere?
We have a small write up about the hardware on our wiki, but it is also down right now.
I think we will share a post-mortem write up of the actual improvements we will do to avoid this in the future.
One thing I will definitly do is to add a KVM remote management console to one of our server boards and move the main firewall into a VM with hardware passthrough of the NICs (this was anyways planned for a 10gbit network upgrade for the second half of 2025). This way I should be able to reboot and even reinstall the main ingress point remotely, so that only the fiber gateway remains as a failure point that requires physical access.
Thanks for all that you do for us and this community! A little downtime won't hurt anyone. I would also be in gavour of PieFed migration π
I totally agree with everything you said :)
I just created an account in PieFed and it looks very interesting because there is the option to create your own feeds! I had the wrong impression that you can only choose from the existing ones. This is so exciting!!!
That sounds pretty cool. I don't know much about Piefed β would we still be able to access posts from Lemmy instances?
Yes, they're 100% cross compatible. As an example, you can access [email protected] from your Lemmy instance seamlessly.
I'd probably make an account there if it moves to piefed.
I appreciate the update was thoroughly confused
I am a slrpnk user. Oh well, shit happens. What makes me a bit sad was that a few months (?) ago something similar happened. Slrpnk.net was down for aa day or two? Don't remember the exact amount of time. What I do remember is asking if there was intention of adding a second admin and making the point that it would be good to create that sort of redundancy. I was ignored.
Mid of july is basically 1 and a half months from now. Hopefully a new solarpunk instance emerges, one that is safer from such scenarios.
Enjoy your vacation and don't stress too much! Shit happens.
I am genuinely confused. What makes you think you were ignored? We do have additional admins, the problem is physical access to the servers to replace hardware that seems to have broken.
We plan to add additional safeguards to such scenarios, but in the end it is a trade-off between reliability and costs. Running a Lemmy instance of our size on a fully managed rented server would easily triple the monthly costs. This would be beyond what I am willing to cover out of my own private pocket, thus making the instance dependent on donations. And that IMHO makes it more likely to be shut down in the future as donations are very variable.
I am not on vacations, but on a work deployment abroad, which further limits the time I can spend on this. Not that it would have made much of a difference, but at least the domain redirection and placeholder text was only possible to do on the weekend.
Well, I got no reply and I didn't see anyone else in the "mods:" bit in the bottom of the sidebar on slrpnk.net. I understand that having more admins wouldn't help in this specific case, but it would help in others.
Regardless, having a public lemmy instance only ran by 1 person is, in my opinion, a bad practice. And please know that I am not personally attacking you. I am just stating my thoughts. This time you were out on a work deployment. Next time you could be sick. The next time maybe a family member had an emergency and you had to help. And the next time maybe your house caught fire or whatever.
Resilience and redundancy is extremely important in public lemmy instances. And SolarPunk is, in my opinion, all about community. There should be more (trustworthy) people with the same level of access as you do.
Regarding the price and all that, maybe that is an interesting discussion to have with the slrpnk.net community? And it would also be good to let slrpnk.net users know how the instance is being ran, what hardware, where, etc, so users can be an educated decision on whether they want to see an instance or not? Maybe providing that info on the sidebar would be nice?
But again, shit happens. Hopefully this serves as a learning event. If not, so much shit is going through the world, losing a lemmy instance is not something about which one should lose sleep.
EDIT: I may be missremembering about the whole "something similar happened a few months ago and my question about new admins was ignored"... I think that might have been on mander.xyz and not slrpnk.net. I really can't fully remember, but I think it was mander.xyz after-all. Sorry! The rest of the post stands though!
I see in your edit that you confused us for a different instance, but I want to mention regardless that Slrpnk.net has 3 active admins, it's not just poVoq (Kris).
Regarding the price and all that, maybe that is an interesting discussion to have with the slrpnk.net community? And it would also be good to let slrpnk.net users know how the instance is being ran, what hardware, where, etc, so users can be an educated decision on whether they want to see an instance or not? Maybe providing that info on the sidebar would be nice?
We have been very transparent about that and documented that in the wiki which is linked in the sidebar. But it seems few people ever read the Wiki and having it integrated like it is with Piefed would probably help.
I agree that more admins with remote access would be good to have, and we have been working towards adding more (there are already more than one, who are not directly involved with slrpnk, but rather the mother project f-hub.org), but physical access will always be limited by the location (Azores) unless we move to an entirely different data-center (which in turn would make it hard for me to access the physical servers).
We have been very transparent about that and documented that in the wiki which is linked in the sidebar. But it seems few people ever read the Wiki and having it integrated like it is with Piefed would probably help.
Oh ya. I knew about that, and I am fine with that. Though I think having it behind a link is bad UI. People will not read it haha.. It should be presented on account creation, in my opinion. Just 1 sentence "This instance is ran on private hardware and may suffer some down time here and there" would suffice.
Sure, that seems reasonable. We will add that when the instance is back online.
If I forget, please remind me. For sure we will not just ignore you π
Solarpunks can have a little downtime, as a treat
Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.
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Work trip and server problems. Where have I seen this before?
I've had the opposite--personal trip and work server problems.
Sorry to hear that! My main account is on slrpnk.net. But don't let it stress you out, "solarpunk" says "punk" which implies "DIY" which means this sort of thing happens. Much better to have an instance run by an admin who truly cares, rather than some soulless corporation.
Try not to stress too much about it while you're away! If nothing can be done, nothing can be done. Solarpunks need to be resilient to things like this anyway. Community over convenience.
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Alt of [email protected] chiming in, thanks for giving us the sitrep, poVoq!
This is an unusually unlucky set of circumstances, but for the Solarpunks who find their way here, let's try to make the best of it. If you don't already have an alternative account somewhere, you may want to create one to use until we're back up and running. lemmy.dbzer0.com, sopuli.xyz, or lemmy.cafe are some solid choices to consider. After that, you may want to favorite poVoq's post here so you can check back on any news.
Even without our home base, we can still share the solarpunky stuff we find and create around the threadiverse (though as Tofu mentioned, maybe this could be a time to take a breather to be refreshed when we come back π).
Besides, if the past is any indication, time will fly by and we'll be back before you know it!
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This is making me want to create an alt on slrpnk.net , since you're so chill and communicative about issues.
He's pretty awesome. He has a monthly thread with updates and actually responds to you too.
Yeah me too, I'd wanted to for a while but never got around to it. Now I probably never will (unless they get the servers back up at some point in the future).
it seems they will, just not too soon
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