People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons “join”, “login”, or “post”. They are lost on join-lemmy.org because >they don’t know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they’ll prefer going back >to their comfort zone.

Agree on this 100%. When I first found Lemmy I had no idea what instance to join, why it matter, or… why it really didn’t matter all that much… It was just confusing… and the first instance I joined ended up closing… which was less than an ideal experience as it was without notice and the instance just disappeared. Took me days to even find out why they had closed. Then took me several more days to find the next instance to join.

Federation is both a weakness and a strength in that there may be people who get turned off by that initial complexity.

Then, some people who join may see low volumes on communities they care about and end up not joining.

I think the ideal would be not how to make it “like Reddit”, but how to help niche and smaller communities have more members. Unfortunately, I think the easiest way is just to get more users to Lemmy in general.

It is not just niche topics, I find quite a bit of things that are not (in my opinion) niche, yet there is very little participation in Lemmy. Take for for example Postgresql. By now it is one of the most widely used databases yet there is a minuscule number of posts and users in the related communities.

Another example. Just did a search for largest communities in Reddit… One of them is music with an estimated 38 million redditors. In Lemmy the largest two music communities seem to be 9.9K ([email protected]) and 18.9K ([email protected]). That is an astronomical difference for something that is as mainstream as it gets given the broad topic.

I think the best each one of us can do is to participate and post as often as possible in the communities we would like to see grow.

I would say that you may consider first getting a clearer idea of what you want. For example

• You want some side work to generate some income?
• You want to explore doing consulting for a living?
• You want to find a project, or projects, that you can work on that produce revenue?

From what you wrote I think the fact that you work on so many things may be keeping you from been good at any of them. I recently saw an interview of the founder of Vercel. By the time he was in high school he was already getting job offers because he became know for been good at what he was doing.

I would suggest to try and get clarity on what you want and also remember that this is not a once in a lifetime decision… you can say “hey I want to try X…” and then after you actually try it realize is not what you wanted and then move to something else; the may takeaway is that trying to do lots of unrelated things likely will not help you achieve your goals… unless you could use all those contributions in open source as reference when applying to a job.

The issue is that anyone who looks objectively at the technology knows that AI / LLMs can’t replace knowledge workers in a large set of tasks, yet you see week after week… month after month the pattern

• Some new company says going to replace x% of employees with AI…
• X weeks / months later… said company reports the attempt was a failure and are having to hire people back

It is as the thought of saving the money of firing all those people is too much to resist for “top management”.

You would think after the first batch of companies go through the same, other companies would learn, yet I just keep seeing the same happen again and again.

There is also the potential backslash. Specially if “management” is dumb enough to try and present firing hundreds / thousands of people like a a good thing… for example Duolingo’s case

Have not tried opencloud yet, but one thing that I find interesting is that it doesn’t need a DB. Plan to test. Currently have nextcloud and find the installation a bit of a pain.

My take on the scoring

Very Easy: Multiple easy install methods (e.g., one-command OS package, single binary, and/or Docker). If only one install method it should be single binary or OS package. Great documentation. 18–20 points

Easy: Limited easy methods or only one. Some configuration may be needed, good documentation. 15–17 points

Moderate: Docker is the only method or manual setup. Average to pool documentation 11–14 points

Hard: Complex setup, needs regular updates or custom config (e.g. DNS, spam) 6–12 points

Very Hard or Proprietary: Little to no self-hosting support, undocumented 0–5 points

Have you considered a distributed filesystem such as GlusterFS or DRBD? I believe those support synchronous replication so writes will go to all the configured machines before acknowledging the write. Performance will likely take a hit the greater the number of clusters in the cluster.

Remember wifi can be an issue, even if you don’t have anything exposed outside. If you have a router that comes with a weak password ensure you have changed it.

Full points for Docker

In my opinion anything that only has docker installation should have points removed. Having it as an option is fine,but having it as the only option has several issues

1- Not every OS even has docker. Take for example FreeBSD

2- Many, non technical, people may not have or even know what Docker is. Having it as the only install option actually ads complexity for that group of people

3- Having to install docker for only one system that you want to install adds an entire layer of complexity and in some cases may even outright discourage someone from installing some software

And post as much disinformation as they want without “censorship”.

Obsidian with paid sync feature. Have obsidian on multiple computers and devices and don’t have to deal with setup or management of the sync process.

The rest seem to be something moderation may help

Who will moderate? If it is a distributed system and moderation is also distributed bad actors can automate upvotes or whatever means we use for moderation to keep their bad content up.

Some of the ways abuse can happen

• Crawling false data / misinformation on a topic
• Putting info on search as part of a scam / spam campaign
• Putting false news about events that are happening, or have not happened at all
• Putting false information about a business competitor
• Putting fake reviews about a product

Just a few that I can think off… existing websites have the issues too, but what is different is how existing sites decide relevance and how often said algorithms weed out the bad content . In my opinion a distributed search engine will have a harder time at combating those, and other potentials for abuse, because there is less control about what is getting scanned there is an open policy of who can join the distributed scanning.

community for commercial sysadmin type stuff, but the ones I’ve seen are all pretty dead Why not just start putting links / posts to make those active. I am planning to do this for a Postgresql feed.

I think we will need a few more lawsuits such as Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its virtual assistant, Siri, recorded users’ conversations without their consent before this is no longer treated as confirmation bias or people been paranoid.

My wife used to tell me that her adds would change after discussing something and at first I did not believe her, but it just kept happening again, and again. It reached the point that we would put our phones away, discuss something and there is no change in ads about the topic. If we had our phones near adds would change.This would happen on things that we would not see adds for normally. For example we would discuss a trip to a place we have never been and she would start seeing adds about the destination after that.

I can’t even think of any valid reason why Udemy would need GenAI. Closed my account. This is the type of behavior I will not accept from a company. If enough people stood up to the Reddit’s and Udemy’s of the world they may, … maybe, be more responsible towards their users and their partners (in this case the people posting courses in Udemy).

I have been using Vivaldi for about half a year and so far it is working well for me. Originally moved to it due to it’s privacy features, but finding other areas quite useful too such as workspaces

If you just do a search for <cpu1 model> vs <cpu2 model> often times you get pointed to sites that can do that comparison for you.

For example searching for: J5005 vs i3-1115G4

gave me several links one of which was Intel Core i3-1115G4 vs Pentium Silver J5005 - UserBenchmark

There were several other sites with similar headers.

As for best one for Docker, that too you can search. Specially if you use something like perplexity.ai and you ask which of those two is better for docker it gives you a nice comparison along with which areas one is better than the other as it pertains to using Docker. Suspect you can get similar good info from using any Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT or Claude.ai (both of which have free plans)

Many, perhaps most, music services have towards the bottom of an artist page a list of similar artists that you can explore. Also, if you see what compilations a song, or an artist, is on you can see what else is on that collection.

Also, music services have collections for different styles of music. As you listen to those, if you like a song you can try to see if you like other songs from the same group / artist.

+1 on Restic