this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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Selfhosted

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I thought this was an interesting post and discussion on selfhosted. Thoughts?

Some great points, but it's nonsense to say r/selfhosted isnt about selfhosting. I've learned so much there.

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[–] [email protected] 133 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Reddit is dead to me and blocked in my router, so I'm good sharing knowledge and cool stuff here.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Agreed. Reddit is dead to me. This community is the primary.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You've got the coolest instance name I've seen btw! Not sure if it's depression lofi band or a real thing but awesome either way

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks! It’s a real thing I started IRL in the before-times, in the spirit of 18th century thinkers. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham ) It’s the ideal I have for Lemmy so it made sense to run my instance using that name.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

You’re one of the founding members of the greater Seattle area polycule, aren’t you?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Meh, I no longer participate but it still had a huge wealth of knowledge. Only time I end up on it is from a search engine.

[–] fhein 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Sad thing is that search engines have got so bad, and usually return so much garbage blog spam that searching directly on reddit is more likely to give useful results. I hope a similar amount of knowledge will build up on Lemmy over time.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If i could do this without my wife noticing, I'd be golden.

Unfortunately, she took to lurking some reddit communities right as I was exiting

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[–] [email protected] 107 points 1 month ago (3 children)

reddit is dead to me so I only see what gets posted here anyway.

edit: Steven Huffman is a greedy pigboy 🐖🐖

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 month ago

Don't insult pigs like that they are amazing animals.

[–] stackPeek 6 points 1 month ago

Remember Aaron Swartz

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[–] Ptsf 103 points 1 month ago

Reddit is dead to me, and given their stance on their apis, should be dead to pretty much all hobbiests deeply interested in self hosting.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Seems like we get plenty of replies that have solid answers, we are just missing posts... So just post stuff! If the content is here, it'll start to grow.

[–] ComradeMiao 11 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I see more engagement across my Lemmy feeds every week. It's definitely smaller and slower here but there are real relationships and communities forming. I think the fediverse is strongly positioned to outlive and maybe even outgrow closed social ecosystems. If you're frustrated with a lack of a certain kind of content on Lemmy make it your responsibility to go create or share some of that content.

Geocities, Myspace, Digg, Reddit all started somewhere. I think any good underlying framework (federated social networks) that enables strong communities will always stand a chance. I really do get early reddit vibes on here.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (7 children)

I wonder if anybody here has tried some of the other failed reddit alternatives like Voat for a long enough time to be able to speak on how lemmy has fared relative to them.

I tried a few during other reddit exoduses, and they all felt... bad. Lemmy is the first one I've managed to actually stay on comfortably without being tempted back to reddit.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Voats problem wasn't engagement. It was literal nazis.

They tried to prop up a thin veneer of legitimacy but at some point they just stopped caring. The front page became blatant "kill all [whatever]" type posts. That's when engagement completely collapsed.

Lemmy has some clearly in bad faith instances which are probably run by nazis. Federation seems to be doing its job of resilience.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Lemmy is the first reddit alternative that wasn't setup by neonazis after they were banned on reddit and therefore Lemmy had the chance to get a userbase that is not made of neonazis. And that gives Lemmy the ability to grow, as most people really don't want to use a forum full of neonazis

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I community dedicated and in love with the idea of self hosting their own software yet avoid a self hosted alternative to a hostile service...

I actually don't think anyone in the subreddit is actually self hosting anything and if they are the irony is heavier than actual iron.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

As more of an outside observer here:

When I was still using Reddit, it looked like most people in that community were just running personal home media servers using basic as fuck raspberry pi setups or just old hardware that could handle it, like maybe a modded Xbox or something.

Here on Lemmy, it looks more like you're all actual networking specialists hosting damn near everything from home automation to business-level server systems for your home business. You guys are serious; Reddit isn't. Respect.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

At the end of the day, networking specialists are in the minority by a considerable degree

[–] AustralianSimon 6 points 1 month ago

I'm on both but got into the weeds thanks to reddit. The mods over there tried making an independent forum but it never got the momentum lemmy got.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've stopped using reddit the moment they locked out third party apps. I still read one community in read-only mode. I'll stop doing that when they'll kill off old.reddit.com.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

@eleitl old reddit was a healthy place. I joined reddit about a decade ago back when it used to be a palce to find communities ran by people passionate about it. then slowly as the enshittification began the passionate herd left. I hope the fediverse would become a goto social hub for people in future. This place has good fundamentals.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I joined over 18 years ago. I agree Lemmy and Fediverse has a future, however online engagement has been falling for many years. I don't expect it to reverse, since most people will be dealing with rising problems in their personal life.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I think federated networks are healthier and better in the long run. Also there should be more smaller instances so the load is not too heavy to bear for any one instance.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@Saiwal For instance specialized communities like #^https://selfhosted.forum/communities should be made use of instead of having all the communities on a single instance. This would be more sustainable and cost effective for the admins too.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This (along with basically all instances with communick news behind them) is a classic example of scaling up prematurely.

When this community is brimming with so much content that users start to "miss" posts about [thing x] because there are so many posts about [thing y], then you make offshoot communities, not before.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@shnizmuffin I agree. I am not complaining, just saying what could be an ideal scenario. Someone on the reddit thread complained about their instance becoming too large too soon and they had to shut down, so was reflecting on that.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

They probably used on of these federation "helper" scripts that just siphons up the entire fediverse. That is just a bad idea and results in a bloated database like they were complaining about.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I like that idea, although I think we need some simpler guides as to what exactly one might he getting into if they're setting up an instance that's not just a domain name. (Costs, potential usage blowing up, legal issues with content, etc...)

Also, I really think there needs to be a smoother way to navigate between instances. I guess, so you're still aware of "jumping nodes", but also don't feel locked in there. (Although maybe I'm just a newb still haha)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

@MonkeMischief oh i agree. Setting up an instance is not easy. And choosing a place on the fediverse can be tricky based on how you decide to interact over here. For example I'm not on lemmy but I use my hubzilla instance to interact with the communities I am passionate about which I find is really cool.

And it does take some time to really understand how this allworks together but once you understand it's fairly easy to use and navigate.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago

Id much prefer people just posted on Lemmy.

[–] douglasg14b 30 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The Reddit space is just a bunch of pictures of people's home Labs it's not really a self-hosted community at all.

It's not interesting to explore and read like this one is.

It's suffered from a common phenomena of any community that grows in popularity where it caters to the lowest common denominator and loses its niche.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

I remember the opposite - the discussions on Reddit had some quality threads with depth and actual knowledge. Someone would post a pic of some random ebay haul and they would receive 10 replies suggesting what they should have gotten instead, along with 18 bullet points explaining why.

The threads here are either people asking how to set up some crappy *arr service on their first raspberry or why god created Jellyfin on the seventh day and not the first.

I've been waiting since the exodus for the quality to increase here... Still hoping.

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[–] EncryptKeeper 28 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Believing that either the Reddit exodus was negligible to that community, or that it was entirely decimated and left to Lenny are both inaccurate opinions. There was a very tangible effect on the selfhosted subreddit specifically when many left for Lemmy, and now both communities both feel like two halves of the same whole. Enough people moved over to lemmy that I truly don’t feel the need to open reddit hardly ever, but I do from time to time. I think lemmy also has a benefit that other fediverse sites like Mastodon don’t, in that Lemmy is not quite as allergic to the concept of discoverability, and the fact that Lemmy is inherently based around communities means that you don’t have to do the Mastodon thing where you spend the first month having to go out and follow a ton of individuals. You can just follow a couple communities and the content flows in.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago

This post is written as if there's only one "community". Why does there need to be a primary? I'm here and I'm happy. If I have questions I search online or ask here, same as any other community

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Continuing to use Reddit is just sunk cost fallacy, does it have more posts? Yes but Lemmy can have more posts if we use it. As someone who spent a long time building and maintaining subreddits did it hurt a bit when I left? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (7 children)

As much as I like the interface and idea of lemmy, I think the content traffic is not enough for me.. and keep going back to reddit :/

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I spent an unhealthy amount of time on Reddit. Getting bored of Lemmy is a feature, not a bug. Embrace it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Truuue!

I probably engage here a little much too, but I'm glad there's not a ton of "You also might like based on where your mouse hovered 0.4 seconds longer" panels on every single page!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah it’s pretty amazing that there’s kinda no algorithm, you just see what you subscribe to in chronological order

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[–] hamsesh 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In some ways that’s a pro for me! I like that Lemmy isn’t endless content that changes when I refresh unlike Reddit. It helps keeps me off my phone XD

But yeah I can see how that’s a con as well.

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[–] 7fb2adfb45bafcc01c80 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It wasn't always followed on Reddit, but downvoting there was supposed to be for comments that don't contribute to the conversation.

Here the guidance is looser -- the docs don't address comments, but do say to "upvote posts that you like."

I've tried contributing to some conversations and sometimes present a different viewpoint in the interest of thought exchange, but this often results in massive downvotes because people disagree. I'm not going to waste my energy contributing to a community that ends up burying my posts because we have different opinions.

That's true on Reddit to, so I'm kind of being tangential to the original question. I guess what I'm saying is that some people might feel like I do and won't engage in any community, be it Reddit or Lemmy, if it's just going to be an echo chamber.

[–] Zak 13 points 1 month ago

It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn't have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be "I disagree", but that option should have no effect.

It's not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Of course it is. People at large don't care if their social media goes to shit. They're going to keep using it and complaining about it even as it gets worse and worse.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I didn't really care about the subreddit even before the API shitshow, as I find the place filled with toxic, elitist gatekeepers.

As I was just starting to self-host and was merely a modest hobbyist, I only encountered hate and downvotes there.

In short, I don't miss that place.

That said, I find the community here much more helpful and positive. It could use a bit more engagement, and we should all post and share more—myself included. But overall, I like it.

/r/selfhosted remains just an entry in my RSS feed to ensure I don't miss anything of interest; mostly, I just read post titles.

So let them have their primary space over there.

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[–] ComradeMiao 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think it's great there's a lemmy community for selfhosted but honestly the subreddit often has more information and replies.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And it'll stay that way until people use, and keep using, this space. So, to use an overused phrase, be the change you want to see :)

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