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.
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.
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.
Goes for most of Reddit these days.
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.
@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.
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.
@eleitl hopefully good sense will prevail over time. I always enjoyed having a personal website and federated protocols allowed me to do so while simultaneously having the ability to stay connected to the rest of the federated web which by itself is a great model. Add to it no ads, algorithms or engagement shenanigans this is going to be a healthier way to connect. But it’ll grow slowly since the learning curve is quite steep for the average person.
I wish Lemmy would get rid of comment voting entirely. It’s not used for anything since downvoted comments still appear (at least in default Alexandria interface, which I’ve used since it was available), and if a comment is downvoted because of prevailing groupthink, it emboldens every clueless troll to make some snarky troll comment in reply for the thrill of seeing upvotes on their snark.
This would improve Lemmy tenfold.
reddit is dead to me so I only see what gets posted here anyway.
edit: Steven Huffman is a greedy pigboy 🐖🐖
Remember Aaron Swartz
Don’t insult pigs like that they are amazing animals.
Steven Huffman be huffing something.
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.
Reddit is dead to me and blocked in my router, so I’m good sharing knowledge and cool stuff here.
Agreed. Reddit is dead to me. This community is the primary.
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
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.
You’re one of the founding members of the greater Seattle area polycule, aren’t you?
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.
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.
Not sure how you came to that conclusion, Reddits search function is notoriously terrible
Add “site:reddit.com” to your google query.
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
Set her up with a lemmy account…it’s better than random flowers she’ll love it!
Hope she likes Linux and (F)OSS
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.
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.
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.
At the end of the day, networking specialists are in the minority by a considerable degree
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.
Yeah I think someone even commented how was the donald selfies but not them lol
I don’t think most people here are self hosting Lemmy instances
Yeah I’m not either that’s not the point. The point is using an alternative that is open and can be self hosted.
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.
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.
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.
Yea, no disagreement. I more am curious if the federated nature is what helps mitigate that risk, or if there is some other systemic distinction that has helped.
I also just don’t know what the others were like long-term - did they peeter out? Would I realize it if lemmy was in the same decline?
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
I’m contemplating moving my blog to write freely but they don’t seem like they will last. I don’t want to host it as I keep my servers unexposed.
Can use a cloudflare proxy to hide your IP
Any access from the internet is a possible attack vector.
I’m thinking about this also. I felt the same about WF. I don’t want to invest energy in medium or another commercial enterprise that will just wipe my content someday.
I’m starting to think the answer is to throw away the idea of a blog as its own entity. Post your content in the appropriate community in the fediverse, and self host communities you can’t find or trust. Decentralize your blog content as much as possible.
This was my thought too. I am considering doing the github blog but via Codeberg pages. While I would prefer to use the fediverse because most locations are potentially ephemeral unless a blogging option became popular they all run the risk.
I just hope Lemmy doesnt fizzle out due to user diminishing.
That’s entirely up to us!
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.
Good point
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.
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)
@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.
@Saiwal For instance specialized communities like #[1](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.
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.
@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.
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.
I agree with spreading it across multiple smaller servers. Sadly, this is my third account after my previous instances shut down. So, there are some risks on that side as well.
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
Id much prefer people just posted on Lemmy.
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
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.
Yeah I dislike that as well. Left many subs for beliefs I agree with because they’re so toxic and maintain some made up elite orthodoxy that no one actual believes
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 :/
I spent an unhealthy amount of time on Reddit. Getting bored of Lemmy is a feature, not a bug. Embrace it.
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!
Yeah it’s pretty amazing that there’s kinda no algorithm, you just see what you subscribe to in chronological order
Huh? Are you sorting by new to have that opninion?
Ahaha I guess that must be the default of my client then
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.
Too bad I like to use it during lunch break. :(
That’s simply a matter of numbers. More people = more content, but people can’t seem to get past the fewer content so they don’t join/stay.
Same. And it’s not just the amount of content.
The amount of times I’ve had a reply with someone obviously trying to be pedantic and argumentative saying “define common thing” is off the charts.
It’s likely not as bad as you think. :) It took a bit of adjusting for me realising I didn’t have several endless AskReddit threads a day to scroll through, but for 99% of my usage it’s great here. It’s also nice being able to interact with posts while not being one of the first commenters. I get more interactions here than Reddit. The only things I go to Reddit for are specific subreddits like dashcam videos, but that’s a once a month or perhaps less frequent affair.
Tbf the quality on Reddit really nosedived.
I frequented the sysadmin, mildlyinfuriating, homelab, spicypillow (and adjacent), AskMeReddit and some other subreddits.
The quality in some of the bigger and less moderated spaces is atrocious.
The most upvoted posts compare with actual spam on Lemmy but they prevail on Reddit.Yep exactly. I’ve also noticed that a lot of subreddits are also run by mods pushing certain agenda’s, removing anything they don’t agree with. Doesn’t make for a very healthy community.
