Technology

I wonder why the world outside a limited subset of the Linux ecosystem is - at most - an afterthought for Fediverse developers.

I hate to break this to you, but OpenBSD is an antiquated OS masquerading as a modern one, and OpenBSD's lack of willingness to support modern standards results in the difficulty you're having.

OpenBSD feels like it's been duct taped together for decades. Anything "new" seems to just be, "sorry, not possible." The OpenBSD kernel doesn't support WiFi 5GHz. The OpenBSD kernel doesn't support even the minimum subset of isolation features in order for Docker to function properly. Why? Because OpenBSD refuses to add these features to their kernel. There are very likely other syscalls and basic features any given open source project needs, even if it's not being run in Docker, that simply do not exist under OpenBSD due to the very limited kernel it provides.

You're upset because open source projects don't support a platform that is old and developer-hostile. Turn your frustrations on OpenBSD - these projects would gladly support OpenBSD if they could.

80/20 rule.

When you are creating something like Lemmy, where you want wide uptake, you need to pander to the masses.

The /r/selfhosted surveys show around half of self-hosters mostly or exclusively use docker. A significant portion of the rest can use docker if needed.

If you're in the 20% that isn't covered by the most common setup, then it can be frustrating. But supporting that 20% takes as much effort as supporting the other 80% (see 80/20 rule), and when things are new it's just not where the effort should be focused.

So you have all those servers, but why can't you install debian or ubuntu server on one of them?

You could also get a $2/month VPS and run it on that. Beehaw is run on something similar (though apparently $12 a month, but a lot more users).

It's "annoyingly hard" because you're not using modern tooling. If Docker is unavailable on your preferred OS, then that OS is stuck in the past. Simple as that.

Docker makes it easy to install a program, including all its dependencies, in a repeatable way. Since you're familiar with BSD, it's similar to jails except with better isolation, fewer security holes/issues, and the software you want to run is preinstalled. Docker containers are essentially mmutable which makes upgrades easy - just throw away the old container and replace it with the new version. (persistent files are stored separately, in "volumes")

You can of course manually install the same software by looking at the Dockerfile and manually performing the same steps, but there's no guarantee that it'd work well on an unsupported OS.

Most of these projects are FOSS, so you have two options. Either ask the devs for OpenBSD support (but try installing everything on OpenBSD to see what goes wrong). Or try modifying the program yourself to add OpenBSD support.

Developers of these projects often target Linux, since it is by far the most used server kernel/OS. *BSD is not nearly as common.

The only way to potentially change that industry wide is to have enough people stubbornly use *BSD and help implement *BSD support for Linux specific tools they use.

Official support is often only provided with a docker setup as it standardizes bundled libraries and other needed blobs. This makes it easier to support many Linux distros.

I feel you, I tried to install lemmy on the server on which I already run 7 other services (Matrix, PeerTube, my website with rails, Mastodon, another three websites with PHP, Nextcloud, Rainloop, some static HTML websites, and probably more). It's a really small server so not much resources left but everything is working fine sharing one instance of Nginx and one instance of Postgresql.

Lemmy also uses Nginx and Postgresql so I thought great, let me reuse those. But nope, after 4 days of trying I had to give up and get a new Server just for lemmy. I tried the install from scratch, there lemmy would just not compile. Then I tried to reuse the docker-compose but to connect the existing Nginx and Postgresql but nope, Postgresql didn't want to work with it because of a extension which was installed but somehow I couldn't get it to work. And then Nginx with the example config file didn't work at all.

Anyway on the new server it almost worked, the only thing which didn't work were the websockets because the example didn't set up anything for them. But I figured this last part out for myself and now I have to pay 5 EUR more each month to run Lemmy.

That's an interesting question. The percentage of servers (with the exception of routers, and other consumer appliances) that run OpenBSD (and variants) is actually extremely low when compared to the amount of servers running Linux. That being said you CAN set it up yourself, rust can easily compile to a binary that works with openbsd by using the target x86_64-unknown-openbsd.

As another commenter said here, *BSD is very far behind the developments of Linux, when compared to developer experience. And realistically, unless you're a huge organization that can dedicate a team of engineers just to manage your system, perhaps because your business is one of those antiquated companies that hate the GPL, or you're someone who likes getting into the weeds, there is no reason to ever use *BSD in a modern system.

Docker is used by a ton of projects and makes installation very easy in most cases

I’d highly recommend moving to a different distro that has docker

The vast majority of servers run Linux and the simplest way to deploy services is with containers. Unix and Windows are much less supported and even running outside containers is fading away.

If you are interested, it may be simpler to spin up a small Linux VM.

I didn’t use docker. I went from scratch. You need to be able to compile rust and run nginx or similar

There is no “official support” for this. Is FOSS. You are on your own to run it. If my instance breaks I can’t just run to the Devs of the project to help fix it. It’s on me.

It’s a project run by two people. And to be fair to them they chose one of the most OS agnostic methods to help build it. You don’t need to use a specific distro, just tools.

You can port what’s needed over to BSD and do a PR to merge it, even if it’s just a BSD_Jails.md file. But it’s gonna take some know how.

Building a Lemmy instance on pretty much any Linux box is fairly easy and well documented though.

On a personal note, imho it does no good to be an OS evangelist. It’s as true for MacOs or Windows as it does for BSD. Use a tool for its strengths. I have BSD running my firewalls and even some storage, Linux running stuff, windows for things it excels at, and macos for stuff it works for.

Ugh, I wanted to make a few sublemmys but if it's that much work, forget it. One thing that's lacking around here are the shitposting subreddit equivalents. r/Copypasta, r/shittyaskreddit, r/okbuddyretard, that kind of thing.