MentalEdge

That’s the one.

I also need to work out how to do automatic certificate renewal and if that’s even worth doing

This is what certbot is for. For example, with nginx, you just set up the webserver to be reachable via your domain.

You then install and run certbot, and it will aquire, install and configure, and then set itself up to auto-renew, a certificate. All with just one command.

With Nextcloud specifically I also don’t like the fact that you can’t change the domain after the initial setup

Yes you can?

I’ve done it thrice now.

Is this some limitation of the docker AIO stack?

FolderSync pairs nicely if you want some sync features on android.

On a desktop or laptop I’d just mount it as a drive.

If you really want automatic sync with offline availability, the Nextcloud desktop client has been solid for years now.

Indeed.

I’m not saying there aren’t NASes that do this. Unfortunately, there absolutely are.

No sane NAS should work that way.

Unless you have a giant raid array, where you need all the drives running at the same time on the same system, plugging in a single raid 1 member, for example, via usb to sata adapter, should let you access its contents just fine.

Provided you’re on an OS that can read the file system. That can require some extra effort on windows.

But yeah. Beware of the pre-built NASes. The vendor lock-in is real.

A part of it is concern.

System administration on a system you’re planning to use remotely over the internet must be done right. Not being sure what you’re doing is how we all learn, but you really should be sure before exposing yourself to the internet.

It’s not like experimenting with linux on a laptop. Self-hosting is usually about providing some sort of service for yourself, which if accessed by someone malicious, can be used to really hurt you.

You’re confusing my use of the word community in its literal meaning, with its meaning as a term in the context of lemmy as a piece of software.

I do not think that sorting people online by where they are from would help.

In fact I think sorting people online by where they are from could even be harmful, and potentially dangerous.

That the change you would make is small, does not change my opinion that it would be for the worse, nor that your reasoning for wanting to make it, as I understand it, seems faulty.

My proposal concerns servers, not communities.

What’s the difference? Servers are communities.

encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues

There’s that false dichotomy again. I think what instance someone is on has very little effect on what content they engage with. And if it does, this change would be detrimental rather than beneficial.

Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.

We must be using different corporate social media. Of course facebook, twitter and tiktok show different content depending on every factor there is. The thing is, they wont confront you with people from your town that have a different opinion. They are tuned towards NOT changing whatever opinion you already have, unless you’re pre-disposed to going down dopamine-laced rabbit holes.

Meanwhile, the fediverse does confront people with differing opinions. That it doesn’t necessarily do so locally, is a feature, not a bug.

I don’t agree.

You present two things as if they are mutually exclusive, when they are not.

The very starting point of your argument seems to be that current niche communities can only exist at the expense of local geographic communities.

As such, you seem to suggest sacrificing existing communities in favor of hypothetical “better” communities based on physical proximity.

Such communities are useful in terms of political mobilization, but they aren’t very fun. People don’t bond over tax rates, they bond over tabletop rpgs, cats, music, movies, etc. And you can’t engage in those bonding activities in local communities until they themselves are big enough to contain such niches within them.

And all of these things can exist simultaneously. In fact I completely reject your view that niche online communities do more harm than good.

Boiled down, your view seems to equate to seeing a bunch of people having fun, and telling them to go do something useful, while completely dismissing that it doesn’t matter whether I learn empathy from my neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world.

What you’re asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.

TikTok is even worse about it. The one time I gave it a chance, it was 90% content local to me. But it was mindless trash. At worst, it was xenophobic rhetoric. Local, doesn’t mean meaningful, or good.

You saw it on reddit all the time, how people from the US often didn’t even realize they were talking to people across the world. Because it’s a foreign concept to them. Say what you will but it is the one corporate platform that doesn’t care where you are from. Everyone discussing something gets pooled into the same communities and threads, regardless of age, sex, or even timezone.

That is a good thing. We need more of that, not less. Because online and real-world communities DO overlap. But you seem to be asking them to match. That would isolate them, not empower them.

Online communities today are the one way that authentically bridges communities of people across the world. If online communities matched offline communities, why would I ever develop a desire to understand not just my neighbor, but also people across the world?

How would I ever go and find out for myself, how people across the world think and feel? Whether my government speaks true about the threats around us, or if there is more to it?

If you overlap a bunch of circles, they all become connected. If you match them, you get bubbles.

That is how corporate social media has been functioning for over a decade, and it needs to be stopped, not propagated. If we sort people into only one group (like where they are from), you isolate them.

But when you sort each person into least two groups or more, you connect everyone to everyone, by virtue of almost every group having members in common with every other group.

That issue being two years, I’m not sure what the current state of things is.

But servers did move towards EU to combat the problem, and haven’t moved back for what I know.

It wasn’t just a problem. It was literally impossible for them to keep up.

Re-locating the server was the only option, as opposed to skipping events or shutting down until the problem was fixed.

Please do not condescend.

I know it doesn’t have to work that way, but for a time, it did.

Here is one of the github issues on the problem.

And yes. It led to instance relocations.

It was either don’t federate, and wait for an update with unknown eta, or move closer to the big instances.

Here is one of the github issues on the problem.

Was not aware of the latency issue. But that’s something that can surely be overcome.

I haven’t checked. I may have been already.

As a support structure providing more open communication, the fediverse might help with that. It in itself is not, and is not supposed to be, democratic. It’s its own wierd mix of dictatorship with the option for the community at large to wrest control away from current leaders, should they want to.

As of now, preferring “going local” would hinder more than help with irl democracy. There just aren’t enough users. If you divided them you’d end up with a ton of tiny inactive communities, rather than a bigish pretty lively one.

And it’s not an either or. Or you can have big communities AND small local ones.

Smaller communities are also something that happens naturally, and is already happening naturally. The reddit exodus was the spark for a ton of new niches on lemmy hitting critical mass.

There is also plenty of non-english, more local activity already. You just might not be seeing it due to your language settings.

Agreed. And it’s not a zero-sum game.

The fact I’m on english speaking fediverse doesn’t mean I’m not on the finnish speaking fediverse.

And what instance I’m on has absolutely no bearing on which one I spend my time.

There currently aren’t many of those.

Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.

Basically, every federated event needs to propagate, but the next one can’t be sent out before the last one is received and an aknowledgement comes back.

That means a higher latency makes an instance federate at a lower rate, causing it to fall behind. Eventually, some instances were having activity from .world show up with days of delay due to being on the other side of the world.

But since your point is mostly ideological/cultural, that doesn’t really matter. You’re talking about identity, not infrastructure.

Which kinda defeats your point. Geography doesn’t matter. You can set up a finnish community on a swedish instance and vice versa.

And I’m not sure what you mean by “reviving democracy”.

The fediverse is explicitly NOT democratic. It’s run by a large group of benevolent dictators (admins and mods) who maintain the environment they and the users of their respective instances and communities desire.

They are kept in line not by votes, but by the fact that any one of them can be defederated by the rest, and they can all be supplanted by any one user with the desire to set up their own instance or community.

The reason Lemmy doesn’t have local communities, is not structural. It’s size.

There are some finnish communities that can just barely be considered active. But if you further divided that down to cities, you’d have maybe one post a year.

That’s not what I’m saying.

Obviously not everyone needs to code. Once I write a bot, it could potentially be used by anyone.

Only a small percentage of mods need to also be developers. But since that group isn’t big enough yet, the solution is growth.

Not asking the platform devs to do even more. They too, are volunteers.

I’m not against any of that.

What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It’s a nice-to-have.

Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.

As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.

Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.

Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)

Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven’t shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.

Indeed.

My core point is that when it comes to moderation, I would prioritize actual mod actions (such as a mod being able to mark posts nsfw instead of deleting them outright) and API support for those actions, over built-in automod features.

Once you have an API, anyone with the skills can implement whatever automation they need.

After that, I would priotize a bunch of other things, too, before ever coming back around to built-in automod features.

If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

By now I’ve written four bots using the lemmy API.

Any one of your ideas is doable in a weekend if I ever feel the need for a modding bot. But I haven’t. Several communities and instances already have them.

Honestly that’s how it should be. Modding can have such diverse needs depending on community that just implementing every possible eventuality into lemmy itself, is a huge ask.

Any large community on discord, reddit and other platforms, make extensive use of automod bots. Because using the API, you can write bots that do whatever you can think of.

Modding is volunteer work, but it is work.

If you need tools, find them. If they don’t exist, create them. If you don’t have the skills or time, then don’t volunteer.

Asking some volunteers to do more than they already are because you think they are letting down another set of volunteers just risks burning out a different set of volunteers.