Mate, I was simply extending an analogy you introduced. I neither know (nor care) what the presence of a McDonalds does or doesn’t do so don’t Sagan me. Nor am I claiming mainstream social media is all arseholes. What I’m saying is that mainstream social media most certainly has the ability and propensity to make people into arseholes due to constant enshittification - part of which is the influencer phenomenon in my opinion and the need for growth at all costs.

I most definitely have reached out to lots of good people on the fediverse and had lots of great exchanges that follow both professional and ‘hobby’ based interests I have.

But here’s the thing - you want growth? OK. I also have no issue with growth. But the best sort of growth in my experience comes organically. It happens at its own pace. The minute you start prodding it along with managed algorithms and all the other stuff mainstream social media now has you end up with an extended hate room. I don’t miss Reddit or Xitter at all. I genuinely mean that. No more ‘suggestions’ of people to follow, no more manufactured outrage getting pushed to my feed, no more clickbait. Instead what I have now is a curated feed across multiple different types of experiences that I spent some time getting how I want them and dipping in and out of when I want to.

You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.

There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.

Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.

Strangely comforting for something I’m sure you thought was a snappy comeback,

I genuinely don’t care about influencers. Like, at all.

Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y’know enjoying a community?

Looks like yunohost with a nicer interface but less apps and less config options.

In my own personal experience, Nextcloud;

• Needs constant attention to prevent falling over
• Administration is a mess
• Takes far too long to get used to its ‘little ways’
• Basics like E2EE don’t work
• Sync works when it feels like it
• Updating feels like russian roulette

Calibre on local machine, sharing a database with self-hosted calibre-web, OPDS enabled using a Kobo to read.

Thanks to the one person who actually posted something on topic I’ve found a few things I can modify.

I asked for help in a self-hosting community. How could my desired location be misunderstood by anyone with an IQ above 10?

This little side -journey has been a complete waste of time. All I wanted was a recommendation or two relevant to things I needed which I clearly explained in my post. Instead I got told I was making no sense and should use third party solutions which is a remarkable thing to read in a self hosting community where I would assume most people realise others want y’know to self host.

If people don’t have relevant recommendations they could’ve just said that or even better, say nothing.

Sorry, I don’t want to be rude but youre talking rubbish.

Getting all of them to install a big offline application with an interface that is totally new to them and will require a substantial learning curve if there’s a possible solution that allows them to simply and easily do the only thing they need is ridiculous.

What on earth are you talking about? How is an offline editor like Photoshop or GIMP in any way comparable to a simple app like the one i described in my post, that simply allows a user to add text to an image?

Kind of. But it wouldn’t be for memes. So that functionality but not that purpose.

Edit: using that as a search phrase has given me a lot of options that I can fork. Thanks for putting the idea in my head :)

What doesn’t make sense about it? They don’t have the knowledge to use an offline image editor so I’d like to offer them the ability to make very simple changes to an image. Photopea is beyond what they need and would no doubt be equally confusing for them.

The ability to easily connect with Caliber mainly. But also its much more privacy respecting.

I have a Kobo Clara which I installed (free, open source) KOReader on. I also have Calibre installed on a desktop machine with the db for that located on my server (which is in my home, not a VPS). Having the db there means it can also serve the Calibre-web install which is also on the server.

When I first set this up I used Calibre on my desktop to connect over wifi to my Kobo and pushed everything I had straight onto it in one go. Now, as I add new individual books to Calibre, I use the OPDS connection on my Kobo to connect to Calibre-web and pull the new book to my Kobo from there. This means I can access my collection wherever I am in the world.

rsync over ssh (my server is in the next room) which puts the backup on an internal drive. I also have an inotify watch to zap a copy from there to an external USB drive.

Sure, it’d be easy to do that but that’s true for everything with an open API really. I don’t think that makes Lemmy less privacy respecting. The only thing a harvester could grab is the things you’ve chosen to post publicly. Is that a good thing? No, not really but it’s certainly much less invasive than being on a site/app that harvests both that and fingerprints your devices and tries to get all your OS/location data/etc at the same time.

If we look at how things went for Mastodon during the various twitter exodus waves, it’s a very similar pattern - huge increase followed by tail off, then another wave of increase followed by another tail off etc. I suspect the same thing will happen with Lemmy/Reddit. We all know reddit are going to continue to do stupid things prior to their IPO so it’s likely there’ll be more waves of influx followed by tail offs.

This is actually good as it’s organic growth/loss. I can’t think of an example where a big push by a company to get more users has resulted in a ‘better’ community, just a larger one. Organic growth/loss is much more likely to result in a better community as oppose to just a ‘popular’ one. Or, to put it another way, lets aim for quality not quantity.

Now that my instance has defeded from Hexbear I don’t see much outright tankie stuff anymore and on the very rare occasions I do come across it, I just block the user. That said, I have noticed a growing trend of people calling anything slightly to the political left of Joe Biden either socialist, communist or tankie as though those terms were interchangeable, which they’re not. Either way, if it bothers you, either ignore it, block the user, block the community or move your account to an instance that is defeded from the instances you are upset by.

Let’s also not forget Lemmy is not mature software and has only become as heavily used as it is now about 3 months ago. There’s a lot of features missing, particularly for admin and mod users, so we can either be patient and do what we can right now, fork Lemmy, create unofficial patches or not use it.

I do feel like we’ve become so used to highly polished, corporate solutions that do everything that we’ve lost our ability to be patient. For me, its vastly preferable to be somewhere where I’m not tracked, fingerprinted, advertised to and have my data sold but at the same time put up with a few idiosyncrasy’s of the software than the alternative.

It’s not necessarily privacy focused but it’s certainly much more privacy respecting than reddit, or any other mainstream social media company. The codebase doesn’t try and fingerprint you, the various apps don’t either so no shadow profile of you or your behaviour is being built or sold on to 3rd parties. The only info that’s stored about you (aside from IP address for mod purposes which is meaningless if you use a VPN) is what you volunteer to your instance and what you post publicly.