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.
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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.
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.
Remember Aaron Swartz
Steven Huffman be huffing something.
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.
@eleitl old reddit was a healthy place. I joined reddit about a decade ago back when it used to be a palce to find communities ran by people passionate about it. then slowly as the enshittification began the passionate herd left. I hope the fediverse would become a goto social hub for people in future. This place has good fundamentals.
I joined over 18 years ago. I agree Lemmy and Fediverse has a future, however online engagement has been falling for many years. I don't expect it to reverse, since most people will be dealing with rising problems in their personal life.
@eleitl hopefully good sense will prevail over time. I always enjoyed having a personal website and federated protocols allowed me to do so while simultaneously having the ability to stay connected to the rest of the federated web which by itself is a great model. Add to it no ads, algorithms or engagement shenanigans this is going to be a healthier way to connect. But it'll grow slowly since the learning curve is quite steep for the average person.
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.
You've got the coolest instance name I've seen btw! Not sure if it's depression lofi band or a real thing but awesome either way
Thanks! It’s a real thing I started IRL in the before-times, in the spirit of 18th century thinkers. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham ) It’s the ideal I have for Lemmy so it made sense to run my instance using that name.
Meh, I no longer participate but it still had a huge wealth of knowledge. Only time I end up on it is from a search engine.
Sad thing is that search engines have got so bad, and usually return so much garbage blog spam that searching directly on reddit is more likely to give useful results. I hope a similar amount of knowledge will build up on Lemmy over time.
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.
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
Yeah I think someone even commented how was the donald selfies but not them lol
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.
Good point
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 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.
Id much prefer people just posted on Lemmy.
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
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
I didn't really care about the subreddit even before the API shitshow, as I find the place filled with toxic, elitist gatekeepers.
As I was just starting to self-host and was merely a modest hobbyist, I only encountered hate and downvotes there.
In short, I don't miss that place.
That said, I find the community here much more helpful and positive. It could use a bit more engagement, and we should all post and share more—myself included. But overall, I like it.
/r/selfhosted remains just an entry in my RSS feed to ensure I don't miss anything of interest; mostly, I just read post titles.
So let them have their primary space over there.
Yeah I dislike that as well. Left many subs for beliefs I agree with because they’re so toxic and maintain some made up elite orthodoxy that no one actual believes
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 :/
I spent an unhealthy amount of time on Reddit. Getting bored of Lemmy is a feature, not a bug. Embrace it.
Truuue!
I probably engage here a little much too, but I'm glad there's not a ton of "You also might like based on where your mouse hovered 0.4 seconds longer" panels on every single page!
In some ways that’s a pro for me! I like that Lemmy isn’t endless content that changes when I refresh unlike Reddit. It helps keeps me off my phone XD
But yeah I can see how that’s a con as well.
It wasn't always followed on Reddit, but downvoting there was supposed to be for comments that don't contribute to the conversation.
Here the guidance is looser -- the docs don't address comments, but do say to "upvote posts that you like."
I've tried contributing to some conversations and sometimes present a different viewpoint in the interest of thought exchange, but this often results in massive downvotes because people disagree. I'm not going to waste my energy contributing to a community that ends up burying my posts because we have different opinions.
That's true on Reddit to, so I'm kind of being tangential to the original question. I guess what I'm saying is that some people might feel like I do and won't engage in any community, be it Reddit or Lemmy, if it's just going to be an echo chamber.
It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn't have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be "I disagree", but that option should have no effect.
It's not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.
I love how reddit keeps me from relapsing by auto-blocking me cuz vpn
What vpn gets auto blocked
A lot of protons IP space is blocked. I'd bet every major provider has a significant number of IPs blocked.
Reddit blocks when they can to attempt and force you to expose your real IP. Once given they can associate it to your activity and make that sweet sweet money they crave.