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@lemmy.ml, 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?
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!
Everyone can host their own instances but you still need a central instance to host the community.
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.
Yep, this is what I said in the post more or less. Cover FOSS, not just selfhosted.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That is also a very good idea!
A Lemmy instance for selfhosted software, but each community shouldn’t strictly be about selfhosting said software though.
/c/plex should be just like /r/plex.
Yeah you’d want to target FOSS in general instead of just selfhosting.
The concern with waiting is that lemmy.ml becomes unstable.
A “selfhosted” community server would be an incredibly cool thing to accomplish in my opinion. There are lots of knowledgeable folks here with years/decades of experience in hosting, it would be awesome if a group of them created an instance, collaboratively, so they could support eachother. It would provide a peace of mind for others that a bunch of competent minds are guarding their accounts, communities and user data.
I thought about spinning up an instance myself when I decided to join the fediverse, but I know my uptime and there is just isn’t enough time in my life right now to properly, securely and reliably manage a public facing service.
Yeah I have been thinking about how to approach this issue. I don’t have the kind of money to pay for a large instance to be hosted in the cloud. I am curious about the feasibility of hosting Lemmy on a physical server. The hard part being protecting the server from ddos, and other attacks.
Edit: I forgot about things like up time as well. Maintenance, internet outages, ect could all affect users on an instance, especially if there is no redundancy in the servers.
You mean a physical server like from ovh or hetzner? They have 64gb RAM & 500gb or so for ~$60USD a month. I’d be happy to contribute several months costs to get started, and I’m confident we could raise ongoing costs from the community in the future.
I’m the same regarding time. Too much responsibility to go it alone.
That’s kind of the point tho, nobody has the time to bear the responsibility alone while living a life. Would it be feasible to set up a team? Similar to mods, a group of maintainers could share the burden. I’m not trying to dump this directly on you personally, just entertaining the idea.
Well yes, absolutely.
That’s what I said in the post.
I think 3 admins is a good number. Fosstodon is a good example of how this can work.
Thing is, at least 1 of them needs some experience with running a site with many users.
If you are looking for an existing community there is also one on slrpnk.net: !selfhosting@slrpnk.net. The admin recently asked for people who want to moderate the communities on slrpnk.
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.
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.
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.
I can transfer this community to whoever wants it, seeing as how the current mod is MIA.
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@lemmy.wiuf.net are you still interested ?
Mmmk it’s yours.
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.
Yeah that’s what I said in the post. FOSS instead of just selfhosted.
There is the !community_requests@lemmy.ml 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.
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@lemmy.ml could be the exact same thing as !selfhost@eviltoast.org. 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.
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.
I’m fairly new to lemmy, but I can search other server’s communities from my home server - just gotta toggle from Local to All. That’s actually what made me accept Lemmy so far, I thought it had terrible community discovery until I found the federated community search.
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.
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
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.
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.
That’s the suggestion.
Problem is there doesn’t seem to be much interest from anyone with experience hosting something for thousands of users.
Maybe take a look at https://programming.dev. There’s already work being done on building a stable instance and fostering a community that will dog food Lemmy. A community does not exist for self hosted yet but @snowe@snowe@programming.dev will create one if you ask in !meta@programming.dev.
