72 points

Damn, and I thought the gender ratio on Lemmy was bad.

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12 points

Wonder how the survey was sent out and whether that affected sampling.

Regardless, with -3-4k responses, that’s disappointing, if not concerning.

I only have a more personal sense for Lemmy. Do you have a source for Lemmy gender diversity?

Anyway, what do you think are the underlying issues? And what would be some suggestions to the community to address them?

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5 points

It’s hard to know overall for Lemmy, but I know that both Lemmy.ca and Lemmy.nz have surveyed their members.

https://lemmy.ca/post/15125231 https://lemmy.nz/post/12001861

Both were around 87% men, where as this selfhosting one is like 96% men.

I would guess it’s explained by society. Women are less likely to be in STEM which seems to almost be a prerequisite for Lemmy and possibly self-hosting, and of those women in STEM, and ( despite what you might think about your own house) there is still a societal expectation of them running the household and doing most of the household chores, even when they work full time. A third job, selfhosting, may be too much.

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3 points

I also think it depends on where you are. It is way more acceptable in the West to have equal roles.

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1 point

The survey was originally sent out on reddit /r/selfhosted, so I expect most respondents are from there.

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17 points

I do wonder how many within the man/woman responses are trans, too.

Idk if that survey was mainly advertised on lemmy, but i know that at least one instance that did a survey had maybe 2% woman respondents, but more than two thirds of those were transfem.

Either way, a little disconcerting. I’m not sure what to make of that or what (if anything) to do about it

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3 points

Who cares if they are trans? The more interesting question is what would make women generally more likely to self host? More free time? Different applications? Actually having a job in IT? Being single?

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9 points

You misunderstand, I only mean that it’s disconcerting that there may be some reason that cis-women do not find the hobby/group appealing

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16 points

Eh, the women I know in tech aren’t particularly interested in self-hosting. Not sure why, but women seem to have a stronger separation between work and hobbies, whereas the men I work with often do personal projects at home related to their work. I think the women I work with would be more than capable, they just seem uninterested.

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3 points

Possibly related to the whole mental load thing: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

When you have two jobs you don’t really want a third.

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7 points

Yeah, I totally get that.

However, the women in my workplace either aren’t married or have no kids. They just don’t want to do “work stuff” outside of work hours, so I don’t think that comic really applies.

Personal experience w/ SO about similar realization

Over the past year or two, my wife has gotten really stressed by the kids, so I (male) have taken over a lot of the tasks involving the kids. I make breakfast and lunch and drop the kids at school every day, then more often than not make dinner when I finish work, and I put the kids to bed every night. My wife is a SAHM, but she’s had a ton of issues with anxiety recently, so she’s mostly been caring for the youngest (4yo) and picking up the others from school. All the kids are quite independent now and mostly play with the neighbors, and she makes dinner 1-2x/week. I do almost all of the shopping, laundry, dishes, etc, but she still stresses about those despite not doing much of it (again, anxiety).

We have a very different way of working on household tasks. When I’m short on time, I do the urgent things first and intentionally ignore the less important details to be handled later (usually the weekend). When she is short on time, she’ll stay up late and do all the details while also doing the important things, then she’s burnt out for the next few days (understandable) and things degrade back to where they were. I think the average level of tidiness and amount of work is similar between our approaches.

So she has essentially retained the mental load, even though I’ve taken the lion’s share of the actual work. Just seeing a mess stresses her out, whereas for me, a mess is just an obstacle that I can work around in the short-term. It’s not that I don’t see the mess, just that I’m a lot more focused on the task than the broader picture.

My thought is that this is a bunch of latent guilt stemming from her upbringing. She grew up in an E. Asian household, with all of the social expectations and whatnot, so when she sees a mess, she takes it as a personal attack on not being a good enough home maker. I had a similar upbringing, where my mom stayed home w/ us kids and my dad was the sole breadwinner. However, when I was a teenager, my mom started to work outside the house and my dad was able to WFH more, so they shared the household responsibilities a bit more (she still did laundry and shopping, but my dad did more cooking and dishes). My in-laws have had a similar transition (MIL works, FIL takes SS and doesn’t work), but my MIL still keeps the same responsibilities she always had.

So, I’ve been trying to have things a bit more complete, even if in just one area, rather than spreading efforts around the house, and it seems to have a much bigger impact on her anxiety than what I would normally do. I’ve also listed all of the household chores, and we’ll be assigning explicit responsibility of tasks to the kids (they had them as chores, but there was no formal handover of responsibility), as well as offering the kids incentives to take on additional tasks (in our case, that means spending money). My goal is to reduce her mental load and enable her to think about things outside of the home to hopefully get over the anxiety issues she’s been facing.

To me, this totally confirms the gist of that post. Taking away the work of a task still leaves the mental load of that task.

That said, I think there’s something more here though. I think men see work as a end in itself, whereas women see it as a means to an end (i.e. men want to hunt despite it being less efficient, because the trophy is the point). I’m sure there’s a ton of variability there, but I wonder if there’s more than just culture at play here (i.e. the above mentality also makes sense in a hunter/gatherer context; men do the big, showy things, while women do the consistent work of the tribe). I don’t know, what I do know is that none of the women I know have hobbies that are similar to the work they do, even if they find their work to be fulfilling.

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10 points

I think we are still in an age where few women were encouraged to do technical things growing up, and found those subjects later in school, university or work. I suspect that will change over the next ten years.

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3 points

That’s also a huge part of it. Statistically, the women you see in technical positions probably picked it in college instead of being a hobby as a kid, so they see it more as a career than a hobby. Hopefully that’s the case, because I’d love to see more women get into it.

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2 points

Yeah, this is me. I refuse to get into work related hobbies, I just don’t want to get burned out

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-7 points

I am disappointed …

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16 points

Lemmy uses activity pub right? 200 in a survey hosting similar stuff is not that bad IMO.

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2 points

What are some interesting things to host?

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1 point

The usual suspects: Mastodon (or mastodon-compatible servers like GoToSocial), PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc.

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3 points

I just don’t see the use of self hosting these just for myself. I guess that’s why so little people do this?

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-1 points

What the hell is an ActivityPub platform?

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8 points

ActivityPub is the protocol powering the Fediverse. Platforms include Lemmy, Mastodon and Pixelfed.

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19 points

I sort of get it. When you self host mastodon or lemmy, you have to deal with the moderation that comes with it. That’s a headache unless you have a ton of free time. Judging by the age distribution, I’m guessing most of us just want things to work so we can do what we enjoy.

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3 points

@CosmicTurtle0 hosting a single user federated blog is also an option, you are only responsible for yourself and your friends you host. Not necessary to host public.

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2 points

federated blog

I wonder what federated blog (or publishing platform) isn’t stuck in pre-Docker era, though.

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1 point

You can run those as single-user instances or with approval of users so you can use those instances for your family and/or friends only.

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1 point
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Deleted by creator
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2 points

Happy Cake Day (Are we doing this here on Lemmy?)

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23 points

I don’t want to accidentally cache some no-no content that gets me turbofucked by the law, sure I could probably defend if it ever came up but that’s a stress i dont even want the possibility of having in my life

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3 points
*

Why? I’m not particularly interested in ActivityPub, I just use Lemmy because it’s the closest thing to Reddit w/o being Reddit. Once a better alternative shows up, I’m out.

I’m happy to throw some money at the admin of my instance, I’m not interested in hosting something myself, especially when things can break when different instances are on different versions.

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9 points

It’s alright! We don’t all have to host our own instance. Existing ones can easily accommodate hundreds of users.

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10 points

Really interesting to scroll through and see. Picked up a couple of new tools to look into, too, thanks!

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43 points

I think this is pretty troubling. Including myself in the sentiment that the self-hosting community needs to do better. Aside from funding individual projects, are there any organizations that help fund self-hosting projects?

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15 points

I’m in the no-bucket, but instead i spend time on issues, helping the community and sometimes code contributions to self hosted projects instead.

This is not taken into the account of the question, however, but should be considered as contributing.

(I also consider donating to be contributing.)

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2 points

Agreed. I’m not much of a coder, so the best contribution I can give is probably $$. At least until I get off my ass and learn something new!

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4 points
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Deleted by creator
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2 points

I wish there were more commercial services around Foss. (And I don’t mean proprietary)

They could do all sorts of things like sell swag and support.

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1 point
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Deleted by creator
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37 points

How so? 40%-ish is actually pretty good!

I’m also in the “no” bucket, but I’ve contributed bug reports and do intend to donate soonish now that I use more visible projects (used to just be minidlna, BTRFS, and openSUSE). I only added Jellyfin a few months ago, and I do intend to donate since I don’t intend to report bugs or contribute code.

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4 points

True, it’s a good percentage, and probably better than most free software. That said, given the communities the self hosted apps support, their excitement for the products, and for some the essential nature of some of these apps, it would be nice to see the yes/no number more 50/50 at least.

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4 points

I’m more interested in dollar amounts. Are people sending $5 every now and then, or is there more consistent funding?

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1 point

I don’t wanna ask if and how much individuals contributed to the ones that host their instances ;)

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1 point

Yeah, really don’t get this one. As an example, I’ve been supporting the guy who writes most of the software I use via Github sponsors for a while, now. It’s nice to get access to additional support chat rooms and perks and stuff, but just the feeling alone is satisfying enough.

Feelsgoodman.jpg

I genuinely recommend those with gainful employment to consider supporting the people who make the software and media you like (E.g. Patreon).

Issue reports and the likes are nice, but they’re really not a substitute for cash (in my opinion).

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1 point

100% of my self-hosted projects are run exclusively by my recurrent donations.

Good thing nobody’s asking about what I’ve donated to the software projects I’m using to self-host.

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3 points

I also think that it is up to the developers to make it sustainable

If they want funding they need to seek it. It has been shown that when a project has a one time donation popup they can raise a significant amount of money. They aso could sell products or services.

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5 points

Wat?

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12 points

I only need to send sign up and password reset emails for Jellyfin, I don’t need to receive any emails back.

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1 point
*

Which service are you using for this?

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2 points

Use anything… Mailcow or otherwise. Just don’t expose the ports on your firewall/router to connect back to you.

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2 points
6 points

I meant more like… which server part are you hosting. Answer: Client…

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9 points

You could self host a web client

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Selfhosted

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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.

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  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).

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Questions? DM the mods!

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