I run my own instance that has just two users. I Federate with who I want (including most instances you named). I subscribe to low drama instances like startrek.website and mander.xyz. I subscribe to communities from MOST of the instances you mentioned, but not a single one has drama (for example, no one on the lemmy.ml cybersecurity or selfhosting communities argues about politics… they just post and talk about those things).

I experience almost no drama. Two years ago, it was different, but I left those communities (but not even those instances) and just avoid engaging with those users (and it was honestly only a few very vocal users).

In my daily life, I’m involved with a number of protest and mutual aid organizations and I can tell you, the whole left is full of very vocal “my leftism is better than your leftism” people. But MOST people aren’t actually like that… just the loud ones. If you challenge them in their spaces, not only will you end up on the receiving end, they’ll turn you into one of them (I have been down that road a couple times). Not that they’ll convert your politics, necessarily, but they’ll convert your behavior. They create and feed off drama triangles and “I escalate, you double down, you escalate, I double down” feedback loops. This isn’t unique to Lemmy. You can experience the same thing in your local hacker space co-op (ask me how I know).

Historically, leftist political and social discourse has always been like this, for all of history. It’s not something special about Lemmy, it’s in the nature of collective groups of humans interested in free expression, positive social change and social justice. We’re angry, we’re trapped in an abusive relationship with the Right and we all think we have the answers. The Left’s greatest strengths and values (diversity, creativity, expression) are its greatest weaknesses. Same is true of the Right (conformity, hierarchy, rigidity).

Second Forgejo. Easiest deploy I’ve ever done.

systemd’s networkd has a built-in DHCP server; check option ‘DHCPServer’ and section ‘DHCPServer’ for that (same man page as above).

Is that true in Debian? If so, cool. I did not know that.

I’m happy to answer specific questions as you dig into it. :) Good luck.

This is extremely possible and I have done a lot of stuff like it (I set up my first home built Linux firewall over 20 years ago). You do want to get some kind of multiport network card (or multiple network cards… usb -> ethernet adapters can do OK filling in in a pinch). It also gives you a lot of power if you want to do specific stuff with specific connections (sub netting, isolation of specific hosts, etc).

There’s a lot of ways to do it, but the one I’m most familiar with is just to use IP tables.

The very first thing you want to do is open up /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward and change the 0 to a 1 to turn on network forwarding.

You want to install bridge-utils and isc-dhcp-server (or some other DHCP server). Google or get help from an LLM to configure them, because they’re powerful and there’s a lot of configs. Ditto if you want it to handle DNS. But basically what you’re going to do (why you need bridge-utils) is you’re going to set up a virtual bridge interface and then add all the various NICs you want on your LAN side into it (or you can make multiple bridges or whatever… lots of possibilities).

Your basic iptables rule is going to be something like

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o enp1s0 -j MASQUERADE, but again there’s lots of possible IP tables rules so read up on those.

That reputation has entirely been created by the media frenzy over busting the worst kinds of criminals.

Oh they’re all using the same technology? Yeah of course they are, because that’s the technology that works the best. It has so many fucking use cases.

Funny that the media frenzy is hitting a fever pitch just as we most desperately need powerful tools for opposing fascism. Almost like that’s not really a coincidence.

Many of my self hosted solutions are just DIY cludges. I was talking to a friend of a friend on Saturday about media streaming and he told me all about his Jellyfin setup and then asked about mine and I was just like “I just store MP4s on an SSHFS drive and play them in VLC on my TV (which runs Linux Mint).” When the survey asked about the various types of software I was like “No… I don’t use anything like that… wait… yes I do! I just don’t use a prebuilt solution!”

Because Lemmy is like social media and Matrix is like Slack and Discord and they both followed the conventions of their predecessors. You’re welcome to go take it up with the devs on Lemmy.ml.

In fact, my wife and I already have a self hosted LubeLogger.

Since when does lemmy.ml ban political content? Is it on a specific community?

I’ve set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.

Matrix is like “Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn’t work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that’s NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?”

It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.

There’s a learning curve, but if you’re familiar with WAF’s it’s not hard.

If you want to DIY something, I have a bash script that builds OpenResty with NAXSI from source. Most of the web apps I write anymore are actually in Lua, for OpenResty, maybe with an API written in something else. But I also help other members of my team deploy their Node and Python apps and stuff, and I always just park those behind OpenResty with NAXSI, just doing a standard nginx reverse proxy.

Every computer I own is an autobot. My primary machine is always Optimus Prime, has been since 2008. Other machines get other names generally slightly inspired by their role / nature. Bumblebee and CliffJumper are miniPCs of various persuasions, Preceptor is my “mess around with AI” box, my big server that handles most of my data and network services is Wheeljack, my Macbook is Mirage, my backup server is Powerglide, my TV (which is an old Dell all in One running Linux Mint) is UltraMagnus.

Back in the day I had like five Reddit accounts. I still log into one of them sometimes (no it’s not my main one, that one turned into obscene invitations for u/spez to bugger himself with a hot poker, I’m not exaggerating).

I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.

The gist of it was

• A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
• A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
• A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn’t, they move on.

As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.

Of course these aren’t hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it’s a definite trend.

The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It’s UI appeals to those people.

Even if so, they may see that as a plus. Twitter survived the massive cutting / culture change that Elon brought to it (as a gross little shadow of it’s formal self, but the vultures don’t care).

I was once a Facebook using programmer guy like you, then I took an arrow to the knee did some work for Meta and got a close up and personal look at their internal culture. It beyond pissed me off and creeped me out. I just couldn’t.

Now, people have to text me to invite me to events and parties and stuff. I don’t know what’s going on with major chunks of my friends group half the time. I have to get my news and gossip the old fashioned way.

Before my Meta subcontractor experience, I spoke like you. But after, I don’t even miss it. Thinking about logging on to Facebook is like fingernails on a chalk board.

I’m hosting a minio cluster on my brother-in-law’s old gaming computer he spent $5k on in 2012 and 3 five year old mini-pcs with 1tb external drives plugged into them. Works fine.