As a matter of community building, lets make this a monthly thing 😊

Community gardening

As stated in our Wiki, we allow members to create their own communities as a way to encourage contributions, but this comes with the responsibility of active moderation. The site admins can’t moderate all communities and unless a posts gets reported, they might not even know about spam etc. Thus we will regularly prune seemingly abandoned communities.

The current list set for pruning is:

So unless someone wants to step up and take them over for moderation and active contribution, they will be removed at the end of the month.

In addition there are these two communities that attract quite a bit of moderation workload and the current mods need support with that (otherwise it might be better to prune them as well):

Technical updates

The originally planned move to a smaller dedicated server was only partially completed and ran into some issue with 8GB RAM being slightly too small for our current Lemmy database use. It might be just a a memory leak issue that should be fixed with the next Lemmy release, but given some related consideration I decided to try use another server with 16GB RAM instead. This move has not been started yet, but I will try to keep the down-time to a minimum.

This server also has a built in GPU that would likely allow automatic scanning for illegal images via Lemmy-safty. This image recognition script is fully local, so no data is transmitted to any 3rd party, but it will likely result in some false-positives (Likely NSFW / child themed ones, which seems not like a major problem for our instance). Any hits will be removed from the storage automatically so this will also protect our moderators from having to deal with such potentially traumatic imagery.

I also made some progress with the account integration between Lemmy and an XMPP/Jabber server. The idea is that you will be able to use your existing username@slrpnk.net ID also for federated chat via the Jabber network. This is more secure than the internal Lemmy DMs as Jabber clients support end to end encryption (like Signal more or less). If in the future some Lemmy clients will add privacy preserving UnifiedPush we can also support that via this XMPP server.

I also started trialling a Movim web-client for it, which besides being a nice chat interface for private 1:1 and group chats, can also act as a long-form blogging site (kinda like Medium or Substack) for our members. Lets see if there is an interest in that 🤔

In theory bridges to Matrix, Discord, Telegram etc. could also be added, but it will need some more testing and might not work out. Voice and video calls will also initially not be supported due to some technical issue, but I plan to fix that ASAP.

Draft code of conduct

I am also still looking for feedback on and maybe some contributions to our incomplete draft code of conduct.

Open discussion

If you have any other topics related to our community here on slrpnk.net please comment below.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netM
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    1 year ago

    The answer to your first point is going to be maths and the water cycle.

    I read more of the study I linked to, which actually seems to support the first claim you linked to, at least partially. Essentially, almost all groundwater capacity estimates are based on deeply flawed assumptions that were criticized in the 90’s. These old estimates over estimate by orders of magnitude the amount of water available.

    The study says that it is possible to acquire accurate measurements of total storage capacity with direct measurement using a particular system, but so far that has not generally been done, so we still don’t have truly accurate measurements, but the old ones are definitely overestimating what highly agricultural/industrial areas have (it mentions that in places that did not have an agrarian revolution, like Africa, the amount of groundwater is quite stable, and is not in danger of being depleted.

    So…Yeah that actually paints a pretty dire situation, and my shallow deep dive conclusion of that was wrong. But as there really doesn’t seem to be enough data, it doesn’t seem possible to give an exact estimate of 40% overcapacity.

    I’m sure they’ll love it, even if it isn’t as profitable!

    While No-till definitely seems to not be as profitable until 10 years of application, in the minimal tilling article one of the options is Strip tilling, which gives comparable yields to traditional tilling while keeping most of the benefits of No-till:

    In one study, yields were higher in the strip-tilled area than in the area where no-till was practiced. In a low phosphorus site, yield was 43.5 bushels/acre (2,925.5 kg/hectare) in strip-till compared to 41.5 bu/a (2,791 kg/ha) in a no-till system.[7] Yield is comparable to that of intensive tillage systems — without the cost.

    It does have some disadvantages compared to traditional tilling, but none that are showstoppers. Would farmers willingly adopt this new technique on mass of their own volition for the sake of the soil itself? Probably not. As the topsoil article I linked to mentioned, the only reason agricultural media sources started reporting on NASA’s study at all is because it estimated how much money the topsoil erosion would cost the farmers per year. Maybe if they feel their livelihood is truly at risk, they may be more willing to adopt these new methods.

    Alternatively, these new methods could be legally mandated, or subsidized (Pay the farmers to use the new methods), just like the government did to combat the dust bowl.

    Though the part below that in the article isn’t super promising…

    Patrick Allitt recounts how fellow historian Donald Worster responded to his return visit to the Dust Bowl in the mid-1970s when he revisited some of the worst afflicted counties:

    Capital-intensive agribusiness had transformed the scene; deep wells into the aquifer, intensive irrigation, the use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers, and giant harvesters were creating immense crops year after year whether it rained or not. According to the farmers he interviewed, technology had provided the perfect answer to old troubles, such of the bad days would not return. In Worster’s view, by contrast, the scene demonstrated that America’s capitalist high-tech farmers had learned nothing. They were continuing to work in an unsustainable way, devoting far cheaper subsidized energy to growing food than the energy could give back to its ultimate consumers.

    I guess the only difference now is that they won’t have any other options but to try other methods once the ground water is used up and their yields are reduced from lack of viable topsoil.

    I’ll find you some ‘better sources’ tonight

    I realized just now that when referencing the second link, I said “Again, no sources or studies cited, just a claim.” which makes it sound like I was directing that at you. Sorry about that, I didn’t mean to direct at you, I was referring to the UN FAO making that claim without sources or studies, and edited my comment to make that more clear.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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      1 year ago

      The entire argument rests on the assumption that we need to continue with the same or even higher levels of conventional agriculture. There is some truth to it in the sense that it is currently the cheapest form of food production, but just by reducing food waste and animal mass production, a large part of that overconsumption of freshwater and top soil already disappears (if not entirely… one would need to do the math on that).

      In addition to that, vastly more efficient food production methods exist that require no or very little top-soil and need only a fraction of the fresh water compared to field irrigation. This isn’t miracle technology, it just needs people building the infrastructure for it, which currently isn’t done as mining fossil water and depleting top soils is cheaper.