Selfhosted
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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i know, right?
if only there was a way to tell other people about these websites in ... some kind of an ... internet forum. and if the forum was on a nice, not too bot-infested, privacy-respecting, free, distributed and federated platform. that would be cool. one can wish...
Or a Directory of some sort....
Are WebRings still owned by something?
Webrings are very nostalgic and recently a TTRPG-blog based one got started up, so that's pretty cool! https://rootr.ing/
the side bars for each community can effectively be a webring. i'm talking about these things here:
(example is the sidebar of the /c/selfhosted@lemmy.word community)
Lemmy suffers from the same discoverability issue... so we aren't exactly the best place to tell others about obscure websites. From the start we've inherited an open-source community that leans liberal, and aside one very large recent shift that means that the community also leans mostly Democrat.
What does that have to do with discoverability? Well, one look at a front page can clue you in. (gosh I hope these screenshots shrink in size for display)
IT, Politics, and Star Trek all over the front page of my instance. Possibly worse on others. Imagine if your 80 year old great-grandma landed on this page. All she knows is what Fox News says. Instant close on the website. Not even going to open one discussion. But let's say she did open the one about the FBI director being missing:
oh my
Now let's see a competing website:
Oh, new Chinese food place! Remote work isn't working? Carrying your dog to pick up food? that's silly! 2.7 million of wine! She must have really hated that job!
So what is my point? How can Lemmy increase it's discoverability? I feel like community diversity would be the #1 concern. Well... one obvious action is to sanitize the front page of the popular instances. I'm going to assume that's a highly unpopular opinion, because then it wouldn't be Lemmy anymore. Maybe perhaps there is a different frontpage for logged out and logged in users? With politics being an opt-in for active sessions? Or maybe we should just post more cute cats.
What do you guys think? Am I completely wrong about community diversity? What changes would you make to Lemmy? It's not an easy answer.
Here is a highly relevant conversation: https://lemmy.ca/comment/21065449. This link is to one comment but also check out the OP that it is in.
Everything comes down to moderation. Lemmy's moderation abilities are extremely primitive - though notably the upcoming additional functionality to send mod reports to users on different instances than the community will help a bit. People get burnt out and can't keep up with the flood of negativity, so stop their volunteer moderating activities. Remember that Lemmy itself got started when its devs got kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic - and likewise many of its initial membership. As for the rest of us, this was the choice that we made - even if for some of us, only after Kbin died (forked into Mbin now).
PieFed offers substantially improved moderation abilities - especially those reducing the need for moderation in the first place, by placing more power into the hands of the end-user by democratization of the moderation work itself. Edit: e.g. someone wanting to avoid toxicity could leave enabled the functionality to auto-collapse or even auto-hide comments that are below a certain up-&-downvote threshold, while others who have thicker skins can disable those hand-holding options and decide for ourselves what we want to see - all without the need for moderator intervention, instead using the preferences of the community as a surrogate moderator in that case. However, PieFed as a the software platform lacks a great deal of polish in its UI compared to Lemmy (though 3rd party apps are catching up to support its feature set offered in the API).
PieFed is the only thing giving me hope for the future of the Threadiverse & Fediverse right now.
I love the fact that federation means we could have a grandma-focused instance that applies all my hypothetical filters by default. It's possible... but there is currently no desire to become the front page of the internet. We're a niche, and that just means we aren't the place to try to advertise for the little guy.
wanting to advertise for the little guy in general is kind of pointless, it feels good until you realize that in a healthy ecosystem there are just always going to be more little guys--the middle guys are selected from larger pool and the big ones are selected from larger pool of the middle guys .. it's the evolution. and evolution is all about niches and being good enough.
the kind of link lists linked in the OP are actually awesome, but they are best served in larger number and in context. especially, if eg. i see someone make an insightful post or article and turns out the same person has a list of links, then it's usually a treasure trove of more posts, articles, insights and even projects and communities. and yes, if i gave the link list to my mom it would be completely counter-productive, regardless of whether someone is a "little guy" or not. the littleness is not the point, the relevancy is.
and sure you could make link lists that are assorted ranging topics with the main criterion "the author found it interesting and want to share it and/or come back later to it", and while some of that cake is eaten by micro-blogging sites like mastodon or bluesky (esp. the sharing and quick discussion). outright simple, structured lists also have own kind of charm.
nice, mediocrely bot-infested, publicly readable, donation-funded, distributed and federated platform
ftfy
The people here are the problem. They screech and scare anyone less than social democrats on the spectrum.
Reddit was never close to as an echo chamber.
This is a self-hosted sub. You are going to see a lot of anti-establishment, anti-corporation stuff here because it's a core principle and/or concern of many users looking into self-hosting. That tends to come with attached behaviors like you described.
While I would tend to agree that it's unfortunate that you have to wade through a lot of folks knee-jerk blanket commenting on certain topics, and that those screeching comments are annoying, Lemmy is generally a big tent, so you will need to accept their presence, the same way we have to just ignore all the AI Slop software presented here.
The price of freedom is accepting the screechers.
My experience was that every sub reddit itself was an echo chamber.
Not having the majority opinion of the subreddit meant getting negative scores because of downvoters, which lead to deleted posts because of that stupid karma system.
But yeah, suggesting a permanent solution for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict on Lemmy by criticizing BOTH sides doesn't get you sympathy points here either.
Even here, the guy you're responding to is getting down voted to oblivion (for Lemmy anyways) for an opinion that I have echoed elsewhere and gotten the opposite response.
Not having the majority opinion of this community seems to mean downvotes too. The only real difference is that reddit has enough staying power for people to put up with it.
I don't think it's a here or there problem, I think it's a human nature problem tbh.
I'm on a Lemmy instance that has downvotes disabled. I can only see that the person I replied to has 3 upvotes and that me previous comment has 2. I don't even see the negativity on Lemmy.
He's at -5 at the moment. Depending on what instances you have blocked, you're going to see different amounts. It doesn't mean those people aren't there.
Even if the post is true, it was the worst way to present it. It reads like trolling:
Call out people's politics with grandiose rhetoric, not backing up any claims with links to evidence.
Declare the other side is unbiased.
I mean, Internet 101 would dictate you downvote and disengage. It's not going to generate a discussion that would change minds or be constructive. Even now we're not talking about small website discoverability, but instead downvotes.
EDIT: I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. I'll try the same post.
If you'd like evidence of the toxic or extreme side of Lemmy, it's not hard to find. Are we really disagreeing that this is a problem with Lemmy? Regardless, you're misrepresenting OP with the "declare the other side is unbiased".
This conversation started started with pushing back on the idea of using Lemmy as a solution to small site discoverability. The toxicity and social aspects are perfectly relevant.
right right. Totally agree. The community here hurts it's discoverability. My criticism is only in the way to the post was worded.
I had this big explanation, but I realized it's not worth it. I already covered what I wanted to say.
Good that we don't have karma here...
everything is an echo chamber
can you name a single thing that's not an echo chamber of some sorts?
Nothing. Blue sky is the best of them though. Lemmy is one of the worst.