What is the Right Place for the SelfHosted Community?

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 !selfhosted, 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?

johntash,

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 !selfhost could be the exact same thing as !selfhost. 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.

dogmuffins,

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.

BastingChemina,

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.

Shortcake, (edited )
Shortcake avatar

Can we petition/poll the other communities to move to a single instance? This might help spur a movement. Also I agree moving from lemmy.ml to another instance is a good idea given the Lemmy creators issues and issues with privacy associated with lemmy in general

https://raddle.me/f/lobby/155371/warning-lemmy-doesn-t-care-about-your-privacy-everything-is

0x,
0x avatar

I would vote for a self-hosted instance split/run by few people. And yes, definitely go the FOSS/general computing route, there's no point in narrowing things too much.

mouseblood,

Also came from Reddit. I think it would be a great idea to host our own instance. (This is self hosted, after all!) Could also reach out to the homelab and datahoarder communities to see if they want to also be hosted on this theoretical instance.

I’m new to the fediverse - is an instance something that could potentially be hosted by multiple members, distributing the actual hosting of it? Spread out across many nodes? That’d be a great distributed computing project

nightauthor,
nightauthor avatar

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

dogmuffins,

I haven't used kbin, but it looks like it works with the activitypub protocol and can therefore interact with lemmy instances anyway ? That being the case lemmy still feels like the right choice for the instance.

dessalines,

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

dogmuffins,

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 @casey are you still interested ?

dessalines,

Mmmk it's yours.

JollyRoberts,

There is the !community_requests community where you can petition to get the mod power for a community who's mod has gone silent.

Probably a good first step would be to get an active mod team for the existing community.

makingStuffForFun,
@makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml avatar

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!

nightauthor,
nightauthor avatar

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

Kabaka,
Kabaka avatar

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

jonathan,
jonathan avatar

This is the Fediverse, I'm not replying to you from lemmy.ml.

Kabaka,
Kabaka avatar

Yes, and I'm interacting via something else as well. However, communities are tied to individual instances. For example, a user could post to photography@lemmy.ml and we could all participate, but lemmy.ml is responsible for the community and its contents. If lemmy.ml goes away, so does that community, etc.

This comment thread and portions of the post are about which instance should host a community. Maybe you are confusing the Lemmy project with lemmy.ml.

nachtigall,

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

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

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.

dogmuffins,

I did look at this. The name is an abbreviation of solar punk I think? This community is focused on something to do with renewable resources & nature or something?

Not sure if it's a great fit for us.

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Solarpunk is also about taking matters into your own hands and creating human-sized community infrastructure, so I think it is very much related to self-hosting.

jabakobob,

I think the idea of solarpunk is to be a vision of an utopian, bright, tech-positive future, where people live in harmony with nature and technoogy empowers us. As opposed to Cyberpunk, a dark, dystopian future where technology is used to suppress people.

computerboss,

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.

dogmuffins,

Yeah you'd want to target FOSS in general instead of just selfhosting.

The concern with waiting is that lemmy.ml becomes unstable.

Echolot,

I wouldn't create an own instance just for this community and rather try to get more and different people as community mods if the current mod isn't responding.

dogmuffins, (edited )

Yeah that's what I said in the post. FOSS instead of just selfhosted.

Edit: sorry I think I misunderstood you. You mean just get an additional mod added to this sub? I that's a possibility I guess.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • selfhost@lemmy.ml
  • khanakhh
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ethstaker
  • magazineikmin
  • osvaldo12
  • Durango
  • Youngstown
  • ngwrru68w68
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • mdbf
  • kavyap
  • InstantRegret
  • tester
  • JUstTest
  • thenastyranch
  • cisconetworking
  • tacticalgear
  • cubers
  • everett
  • modclub
  • GTA5RPClips
  • anitta
  • Leos
  • provamag3
  • normalnudes
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •