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.
reddit is dead to me so I only see what gets posted here anyway.
edit: Steven Huffman is a greedy pigboy 🐖🐖
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 :/
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.
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
