I use zerotier for that kind of stuff, mostly because it runs native on my router (mikrotik) and is zero config so easy to run on a random mobile device I might have on me.
"If you ever use containers to self-host, do you prefer manual or automatic updates?" "Yes"
Rewording it doesn’t really help.
Old adage…People don’t want choices, they want what they want.
Every time you ask a question you lose a chunk of your audience. With something like lemmy, they want to look at messages and respond. Let them do that. Encourage them to choose an instance later, when they’re equipped to make that choice.
Yes that’s a hard problem with federation… mastodon went for a default instance as a solution. There are likely better ones but that’s a problem lots of people are working on.
Routing would be the hard bit I expect… if the person you were communicating was 10 hops away how to find the route? Things like BGP do that naturally, but really you don’t want to burden potentially nontechnical users with BGP…
I’d say write it for yourself then worry about the cross platform later. You can always go back and rewrite.
That sounds like the kind of stuff we make at $dayjob (that’s for the building trade, where they often have complex spreadsheets and going to an app that calculates everything down to the number of screws for them is a huge benefit).
You could probably still do it with a spreadsheet, just have parts list add/remove fan out into the cutting list and update automatically. I imagine it’d get quite ugly, but doable. If you want to do optimisation (buy 1 5 foot length and cut rather than 2 2 foot lengths, because it’s cheaper, for example) it gets even uglier and at that point a bespoke app becomes more sensible.
Month or so… It isn’t growing much, seems to be quite aggressive in its pruning of old stuff.
Being lemmy it’s all docker, but the base OS is debian.
So… more than threads then :p
(guessing a bit, but reports say it was 8 million at the end of july and still falling…)
Lemmy is actually quite light… My lemmy VM is currently using only 317MB of the 1GB I’ve allocated it, and about half of a 16GB disk.
Obviously I’m not subscribing to every possible group there… only a dozen or so… but I could go a lot bigger without it becoming a problem.
TBH I’d use the celeron and get a bigger RAM stick in there (cheap), and you’ll be fine for a 1 person instance.
IRC is great, if a little underground these days. It’s also trivial to run your own although federating requires cooperation from both ends so it’s not quite as networked as lemmy or mastodon.
I think they were experimenting with showing lemmy posts as well.
You follow someone who is on mastodon.social, they see the follow, look at your profile and follow you back
Or you reply to a thread, someone on mastodon.social sees it, thinks you sound like someone they’d find interesting and follows you.
I suggest adding some relays otherwise the only posts reaching your server will be things you yourself have followed, which makes hashtags a bit useless.
My current active relay list is: https://bigrelay.social/inbox https://relay.toot.io/inbox https://relay.intahnet.co.uk/inbox
But those are just what works for me… not any particular recommendation.
Then follow lots of interesting people. Look on other servers if you’re stuck, eg. the live feeds on mastodon.social. The more you follow the more conversations you’ll see and find more interesting people. People who boost a lot are a goldmine for discovery (some people make a hobby of boosting eg. https://mastodon.social/@lisamelton).
It’s fundamental to mastodon… you can subscribe to hashtags, you can search hashtags, but you can’t (usually) search posts directly. That works for the most part, but does limit discoverability slightly.
Groups seem to be the new hotness, though… there are some 3rd party implementations already but a proper implementation in the core is upcoming: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
Federation is the invisible glue that makes it all work… I have my own server but i can talk to you on lemmy.world without having to think about it or do anything special. Most people joining in the future won’t need to care federation even exists, just like they don’t care SMTP exists.
That said I suspect there will be a few mega servers anyway… just like gmail… people seem to like being where everyone else is.
BigBoobFriday has to happen.
Same with mastodon, thread, tiktok and all the rest. There doesn’t have to be a winner, despite the press being obsessed with finding one.
There are some well known ones, like L4sbot, that copy everything but they’re upfront about it with bot in their name.
There are a few others more sneaky.