this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Self Hosted - Self-hosting your services.

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What is the Right Place for the SelfHosted Community? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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While I'm not interested in encouraging /r/selfhosted users to leave reddit, I thought it would be good to have some discussion around the possibilities for a selfhosted community on lemmy.

It looks as though most users are washing up in [email protected], but this is but a temporary refuge in these troubled times. The single mod is not responsive, lemmy.ml is already struggling with load, and the background lemmy.ml community may not be right for us. If we set up shop here we're just going to have to move, probably sooner rather than later.

So if we move, do we create our own instance or move to an existing one better aligned with our needs?

Given that there don't seem to be any instances which are really ideal, the remaining advantages to choosing an existing instance is simply that we rely on someone else's infrastructure (and the associated time, skill, and responsibility). This is a significant advantage which makes this option tough to pass up, but the equally significant disadvantage is that we don't get our own place. It's like renting a room in a frat house rather than building our own mansion.

The remaining option is to create our own instance. If we were to go this route, in my opinion it is critically important that the responsibility for this be shared amongst several people. This dramatically reduces the odds that someone loses interest, or lacks the resources to support the community long term. While I'm certain that everyone in this sub could spin up an instance, we all know that providing high availability to potentially thousands of users is not something to be undertaken on a whim. There's a significant risk to the community in allowing someone to take this on themselves.

I think fosstodon (mastodon) with several admins is a good model of how something like this can work. I also think it would be a good idea to broaden the subject to FOSS rather than merely self hosting.

So the questions are...

Do you think we should create & support a community on an existing instance, or create our own instance?

If an existing instance then which one?

If a new instance then how would you like to see it operated?

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

I think it would make most sense to collaborate with similar subreddits, which overlap with /r/selfhosted.

/r/selfhosted /r/homeserver /r/homelab /r/datahoarder

These subreddits and more overlap, so to me, it would make sense if these subreddits would come together on the same Lemmy instance, jointly controlled and managed, with each of their own community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep, this is what I said in the post more or less. Cover FOSS, not just selfhosted.

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

You keep recommending the FOSS umbrella, but at least on Reddit the selfhosted/homeserver/homelab/datahoarder subs are interesting, while the FOSS reddit tends to be so boring I unsubscribed a long time ago.

The interest there seems to trend more in the direction of license and convincing people, with an undercurrent of "where can I find a carbon copy of this expensive program for free". My interest is in resource-efficient infrastructure, so I don't see a lot of overlap.

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

I don't really understand. I'm not talking about creating a "foss" subreddit / sublemmy / community.

Anything self hosted is by it's very nature free open source software (foss). This also applies to homeserver & homelab. Admittedly datahoarder is to a lesser extent but there's still a very large cross over.

Therefore foss seemed like a good umbrella term, as a way to group the majority of these communities. So you create a foss instance which would be the ideal place to host selfhosted, homeserver, homelab, and datahorder subreddits / sublemmys / communities.

If I was looking at a list of instances, and saw a FOSS one, that's where I'd expect to find these communities.

That said, I'm open to being convinced that there's a better way to categorise these things ? What would you use as the umbrella term?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Having FOSS discussion isn't bad, but there is most definitely a lot of proprietary software in the selfhosted world. Game servers, most network device software, applications like plex, heck, lots of people run windows on their selfhosted infra.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Something I'm wishing for, is for a lemmy community to have multiple home servers.

I'm still learning how lemmy works and only just set up an instance yesterday, but it feels weird that a community is still sort of centralized. I'd like to see something where [email protected] could be the exact same thing as [email protected]. E.g. something like how multiple IRC server can be combined to create a larger network or how Matrix has room aliases.

To a user, it shouldn't matter which server they're on as long as the communities are linked to each other.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, obviously it would be difficult to keep everything in sync without a single source of truth.

As it is now, the server you're connected to is doing all the work. I think the existing model can be modified to reduce the current points of confusion.

Like not being able to see communities on other servers in search is a problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think this is in the work.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

I've seen that this issue had been discussed quite a lot recently.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You don't need to move ftom lemmy.ml. You're a group of self hosted gurus, so this is your chance to actually self host. Don't hide behind excuses that lemmy.ml won't be able to handle things. Just do what you do best and host your own instance. Sounds bloody fantastic to me!

This is your time to shine!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think there is some confusion. Lemmy.ml is itself an instance. Hosting your own means not using lemmy.ml.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Are you saying to leave the community on lemmy.ml and just self-host lemmy instances to interact with lemmy.ml?

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

I can transfer this community to whoever wants it, seeing as how the current mod is MIA.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That sounds like the right move if you're happy to do it.

I would be happy be a mod at least in the short term, but willing to hand over to someone else later on if someone appropriate emerges.

Also @[email protected] are you still interested ?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Mmmk it's yours.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

So looking at Mastodon as an example, everyone went on the main site and it wreaked havoc for a while, especially as the sites increased in size.

Might make sense to find a smaller site or roll our own.

It's "self-hosted" after all, I would suspect our use-cases and skill-set are probably better served running our own. Or setting up a topic at one of the smaller-tech focused sites.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you are looking for an existing community there is also one on slrpnk.net: [email protected]. The admin recently asked for people who want to moderate the communities on slrpnk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes people are very much welcome on our community. It is a bit more focused on homelab stuff via low-power ARM boards and upcycled old PC hardware, but this is not a strict requirement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I’m a fan of the kbin application, so I think I’d vote for that, and advocate for a foss/diy-tech focused instance

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If the selfhosted community decides to create an instance, I think it would be cool to host a bunch of selfhosted communities. For example you would have the instance at example.selfhosted, then a selfhosted community, and also other communities that use selfhosted software. So example.selfhosted would have communities: selfhosted, plex, jellyfin, vaultwarden, ect.

As for leaving lemmy.ml I vote to wait a bit. I don't think there is a easy/good way to move instances at the moment. So in effect you would be abandoning this community and starting over on a different instance. Although I might be wrong about that.