I thought this was an interesting post and discussion on selfhosted. Thoughts?
Some great points, but it’s nonsense to say r/selfhosted isnt about selfhosting. I’ve learned so much there.
I love how reddit keeps me from relapsing by auto-blocking me cuz vpn
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.
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.
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.
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
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 wish Lemmy would get rid of comment voting entirely. It’s not used for anything since downvoted comments still appear (at least in default Alexandria interface, which I’ve used since it was available), and if a comment is downvoted because of prevailing groupthink, it emboldens every clueless troll to make some snarky troll comment in reply for the thrill of seeing upvotes on their snark.
This would improve Lemmy tenfold.
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.
