this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
130 points (91.1% liked)

Selfhosted

40219 readers
1155 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Correct me if I'm wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I'm a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any "balancers" to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] chiisana@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are there ways to manage lists of such? For example, on the former platform that doesn't deserve a call out, you can do "me_irl+meirl" and aggregate both into one feed. This makes reading the (albeit potentially cross posted) content in a unified feed much easier.

Another similar point I'm having a hard time getting over is that with a centralized platform, it is easy to go to "Subject A", and see everything on that subject. However, now I need to see "Subject A@lemmy.world", "Subject A@lemmy.ml", "Subject A@someother.instance"... Yes, I could subscribe to them all, but this ultimately end up creating a noisy home feed with also "Subject B@lemmy.world", "Subject B@lemmy.ml", "Subject C@lemmy.world", "Subject D@lemmy.ca", ... etc. all baked into one feed, as opposed to just something focused on "Subject A".

Lastly, discoverability leaves a lot of room for desire. Today, I'm fairly new to Lemmy, I am actively seeking out communities that I might be interested in, across multiple popular instances, and hoping that federation is enabled between the two instances. Tomorrow, I'd find that I'm subscribed to too many (see the noisy main feed issue above), and I'd remove a bunch. Next week, am I likely to go to the Join Lemmy directory to find new instances, and add "duplicate" communities from newly popular instances? I think not.

I think the long term survival of the platform (to expand beyond just us tech nerds that hate the former platform) will depend a lot on streamlining this workflow to make content discovery much more consistent. Even a simple option where a pseudo "!Community@" (with no instance) feed that aggregates all the "!Community" regardless of instance that you've subscribed to, might go a long way.

[–] Aninjanameddaryll@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Discovery really has been the biggest drawback for me. The r/system combined with wikis and sidebars made it very easy to find interesting things.

That's lacking in lemmy so far. Which, it isn't a bad thing, barriers to entry have benefits. But from a user perspective, trying to replace reddit, the difficulty in navigating and finding things is frustrating.

But I'm coming from reddit, and they aren't meant to be the same. The issues are part of what makes it next to impossible for what happened there to happen in a federated system. And I'm so fucking sick of corporate bullshit ruining good things . I figure that lemmy will catch up in feature parity soon enough, and there's bound to be apps that make it easier to use at some point.

I just wish I had the resources to run a server myself.

[–] Mummelpuffin@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, by just searching topics in the search bar you can typically find instances related to the search. You need to click the "chain" icon rather than the "federated star" icon to view the post "from your instance" and stay on your personal account.

[–] SickIcarus@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You need to click the “chain” icon rather than the “federated star” icon to view the post “from your instance” and stay on your personal account.

Woah. I’ve been clicking the star the whole time. This may make things a looot easier.

[–] Mummelpuffin@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

It does! That way, you can immediately subscribe to the community regardless of what instance it's on.

[–] SomethingBurger@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The feature I'll miss the most from Reddit is multireddits. I wish there were a way to create multilemmys.

Even a simple option where a pseudo “!Community@” (with no instance) feed that aggregates all the “!Community” regardless of instance that you’ve subscribed to, might go a long way.

I think we should have both this and multilemmys. For example, I would group all !gaming@... communities in an pseudo-community, then put it in a multilemmy with other gaming communities (Linux gaming, PC gaming, etc).

[–] chiisana@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I really do think we need both:

!gaming@... or !gaming@ which aggregates [!gaming@instance.a](/c/gaming@instance.a), [!gaming@instance.b](/c/gaming@instance.b), ... etc. that I've subscribed to into a single feed; and

#gaming which I can put !gaming@..., !pcgaming@..., and !consolegaming@... into a single collection.

This way we'd get the flexibility to pick and choose what we'd want to see more easily.