@hybridsarcasm@lemmy.world has not replied to me (or anyone according to his profile) after that last bit about making me and @ayyy@sh.itjust.works mods, so I’m going to go ahead and work on holding down the fort. Its a bit of a hectic weekend for me with activities for my kids, so you may see some post activity being restored or other such things in no particular order.
So who am I?
Well, I’m a specialist consultant by day, and an avid self-hoster. Off the top of my head, I host:
- Jellyfin
- An over-complicated *arr stack to suit my particular tastes of media management
- Prometheus+Loki+Grafana for my monitoring stack
- Home Assistant
- Personal website
- Immich
- MagicMirror
- ROMM for that fun emulation on the go
- Kavita (mostly because I keep forgetting to change the url on my wife’s phone for the other OPDS server) & Calibre (the other OPDS)
- Local AI models for testing purposes mostly
- Endurain for my post-Strava life
- Various stuff for utility for SSO, LDAP, databases, MQTT, so on and so forth
Predominantly running on Proxmox as LXCs, with some docker here and there. So pretty much the same as a lot of you, just another *selfhoster (edit: WHOOPS! I a whole word there, now fixed)
Moderation Style
Lets call it “light touch”. I’m pretty sure everyone here is more than capable of handling most things with the appropriate votes - we’ve seen this with the recent thread that resulted in this moderation change. In case you couldn’t also guess from my home instance, I’m a firm believer in people being able to regulate themselves, so as far as I’m concerned that means the rules themselves can be up for discussion as well. As this community is on lemmy.world, of course that means the TOS here must be respected.
There are people on both sides of the keyboards, so please be respectful of others.
The one thing that I just do not tolerate is bigotry.
And finally, feel free to send me a message to address any issues! So lets have some fun with self-hosting.
Edit: Added a direct link to the Lemmy.world TOS for clarity. This community is on Lemmy.world and subject to its terms, as managed by the admin team.
Great to meet you and it seems like the community is in good hands. Thanks for the work you’re doing!
Any thoughts on the low effort rule? I think it’s neither necessary nor been enforced anyways.
I think its pretty much pointless tbh. Upvotes and downvotes address low effort posts pretty quickly, so why even bother with a rule about it?
I just figured we’d start with rule 3 since its the cause of so much… Shenanigans.
Welcome! As a new mod of a community that recently went through similar growing pains (and rules updates), I can appreciate the challenges ahead of you and @ayyy@sh.itjust.works. You sound like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and that will do a lot for you and this community. There is nothing more humbling than being given a responsibility like this (at least, that’s how I feel: YMMV).
It is my understanding that mods from different instances than the community do not (always?) see the mod reports for the community (or get notified?). It might be worth looking into more just to be sure.
Also, I’d love to learn more about your local AI setup. I’ve been interested in doing something like that myself, but I am not sure where to start. 😊
It is my understanding that mods from different instances than the community do not (always?) see the mod reports for the community (or get notified?). It might be worth looking into more just to be sure.
They don’t, I’ve created an LW alt but unfortunately had to open a ticket with the .world admin team as I can’t promote my alt. So its kind of “eyes on” at the moment until that ticket is resolved.
Also, I’d love to learn more about your local AI setup. I’ve been interested in doing something like that myself, but I am not sure where to start. 😊
Its nothing too crazy - I have a Mac mini I needed for a specific client need which was gathering dust, and they are really quite efficient in terms of power and llm use.
So ive got OpenWebUI and my SearX on another box, along with some context providers (like grafana MCP I’m currently playing with), and ollama running with a few models available and nothing else on the Mac.
Lately its most common use is checking my docs for tone (personal, company, etc) based on training ive done from my previous work, which has been nice to have. Kind of a pre-check before I publish to wherever.
Unrelated to the topic: what eBook reader with opds support are you using on your phone? So far I’m using koreader which works but is a bit clunky.
I was using koreader, but currently trying out Anthology and ProseReader which are fairly new (at least to me, I think they both came out in the last year).
I mostly read on an e-ink kindle for books though, which I just load up over USB. For comics I have an old iPad and a newer one I got from work thats been replaced, which get a similar treatment of “just copy what I want onto there” but from the network share rather than USB.
Grabbing epubs on the phone is usually a result of being bored somewhere and unprepared, which is probably one of the reasons I keep forgetting to change it for my wife.
She’s gotten used to koreader so I haven’t introduced her to the other options while I test them (well… When I can get to it at least).
Despite the absolutely wild events that led us here, you sound like a really solid moderator. Thanks for the intro!
What’d I miss?
https://lemmy.world/post/47758551
I’m just gonna link this post.
If I had to paraphrase what happened, there was some (IMO polite) disagreement over the stringency of enforcing rule 3 and whether it was negatively impacting the community by removing posts that people worked hard to answer due to being more of a hardware-related topic, and then the previous mod abruptly made the people who offered the criticism moderators without any discussion on the matter with them first and then hasn’t been seen on Lemmy since.
I stopped posting and commenting on this community because things kept getting deleted even though it was all very clearly about self-hosting. It was very disappointing because I spent a lot of time on my contributions. One post I made a while ago was about self-hosting security and had tons of activity only for all that information to be removed over rule 3. Very confusing and disappointing.
I’m interested in seeing how the vibe around here changes going forward. Maybe I’ll be less cautious about participating.
Ditto here. Rule 3 was…unevenly applied.
I hope you do!
That actually sounds like it was a fantastic post, and I don’t remember even seeing it which is really disappointing. I’m still making my way through the log, and some posts seem to be completely gone as well so I won’t be able to restore them, which really sucks.
One thing I really don’t like is that it made people cautious to contribute, I’m really hopeful that will change.
This was a number of months ago so I doubt it would be remembered anywhere at this point. After that, a number of posts I commented in were also removed as well. It was very confusing because everything seemed appropriate for the community. I do look forward to seeing how this community grows/changes now.
I’ve taken a very minimalist approach to self-hosting but I’ve given extra attention towards security. I feel like security doesn’t get talked about as much as it could be. It’s especially important these days with bots roaming around everywhere.
I also use some unconventional methods that I’d like to share (layering security with obscurity with a focus on security first). It’s not a one size fits all solution but I can stay private while exposing my server with minimal tools. It works for me though and my logs haven’t shown any outside activity besides my own.
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Please do!
Ah, thanks. Saw it when it came in and even replied.
I remember thinking “there are a ton of people here making assumptions and assuming the worst about people, based on no evidence”… Other people were saying maybe it was mods.
Sadly a bunch of those people will move forward thinking a ton of users were just being assholes and not what actually happened.
One of our new mods was banned from this community for telling someone “kys” 🤥
Certainly not me - thats an instance rule over at the FAF, and not something I’d want to see in the first place.
That said I also accept that people have off days sometimes, and a conversation that gets to that point probably wasn’t handled well either to get to that point of escalation.
I would not expect to see that again in comments without a mod action on it, fwiw.
No, the other one.
Great to hear that you would have a problem with it.
Personally, unless you guys feel you are absolutely up to the task on your own, I think you should also search out a great candidate and add at least one more mod.
Part of my plan personally, but until I hear back from the lemmy.world mod team I can’t even get my newly created .world alt for reports modded. I have a ticket open, once its resolved I’ll be able to make a post about it.
Great!!
Thanks for stepping up.
Well thanks!
Hopefully we’ll avoid wild events in posts going forward, and just have posts about wild events in our logs instead.
Thank you! Looking forward to hearing from you!
My only request/suggestion, is Rule 3. Rule 3 I think has been used way too often to justify removing posts seemingly arbitrarily. A blanket “No hardware” rule is restrictive when homelab and selfhosted are a venn diagram that are very close together. For example, you can’t talk about Unraid without also talking about what drive types you use. Or a post I’m thinking about posting, “What doorbell cameras do you prefer with HomeAssistant? and What NVR should I use?”. All selfhosted, all homelab, all interconnected… but I am afraid of posting it because of the iron fist.
By the way, not sure what your post was that got removed, if you’d like to let me know I can restore. It won’t get the same attention though since it would be a less recent post, so if its something that still would benefit from discussion, a new post might be better.
I’ll be making a new post about rule 3 probably tomorrow, but especially considering the recent activity, that is not a rule thats going to be enforced the same way.
Nah it’s okay, unless you want to for history and reference. Link
Ironically I had so much help in finding the info before it was removed that all I did was eyeroll at it’s removal. Will be looking forward to the update!
Bringing in both your threads, I agree. With only a handful of active communities, saying “this isn’t the right one” without pointing to an active community where it is a good one seems… destructive. Personally, if no hardware remains a rule, then it seems natural to then start a sister community which is hardware focused and Rule 3’s text then would recommend that community right in the rule itself. May not be such a bad idea now that I’m typing it.
Completely agree, especially on the hardware part. This is also why I mention self-regulation - and there was a recent post that demonstrated it - we are going to interact with posts that are related to self-hosting, and on ones that are questionable, people are going to question then up/downvote accordingly.
I don’t personally see a need for the rule at all.
As a mod myself on much smaller communities, that’s my view too. Even if there is something I personally dislike, it’s not my community, if it’s getting upvotes then obviously people are enjoying it. If I get reports I look into it, but it has to be a pretty blatent violation for me to step in. Why would I want to hurt engagement? There’s so few of us already here.
Precisely - and on the last point especially, it means that there needs to be some leeway. There aren’t so many active communities that you could say “obviously this is a question for the proxmox on tiny/mini/micro hardware support community!”, because something like that has 2 subscribers and no posts in a year.
Its not an approach that leads to community, IMO.
Unrelated to the larger topic, but how do you find Endurain? I want to dump Strava, but last time I looked at self hosted Strava alternatives (maybe a year ago?), none of them really came close to parity in features.
Hi, there is some new players in town :
https://fitpub.social/ https://github.com/fedisport/vocabulary
Now thats fun - thanks for sharing!
It still has some areas that are lacking tbh, but with the recent API restrictions… I can’t see myself going back to Strava at this point. I’d rather try and see what I can do to add features to endurain or use supplementary tools - honestly the biggest thing is around more complex analytics, which I was thinking I may just pull into grafana to do. Would make a great discussion post though!
That’s got to about the most straightforward thing I’ve heard on the internet in a very long while, and <clears throat nervously> and from a mod. No disrespect intended, at all. It’s quite respectable. You say ‘light touch’ and ‘people being able to regulate themselves’…have…you…met these people? I kid, but I’m sure that’s where the TOS comes in which is forthcoming or am I just being stupid again and overlooked it? I mean, I see rules
Respectable stack as well. At any rate, good to meet you. Thank you for your clarity.
Sure have! Everyone can be quite opinionated, and I personally love it. Different opinions, even strong ones on both sides, can make for fantastic discussions on specific needs and preferences that I think make for great reads.
As long as the discussion stays a discussion and doesn’t devolve into a slapfight or something. Which does make me want to suggest the disengage rule of the FAF here, but considering what I have seen of the modlog so far it hasn’t really been an issue anyway.
The TOS I refer to is the Lemmy.world TOS which I have zero control over. The rules that I suggested are up for changes are the ones in the sidebar here, and the biggest on the docket is rule 3 which inspired the recent meta thread (and caused confusion about what was actually going on around here).
Gotcha. Thanks
Happy to help out if you want coverage; I’m in Eastern time.
I think the existing moderation was pretty good, if a bit strict on what is or is not self hosting (e.g. I probably would have let that LUKS post slide). “Light touch” unless something is egregious is my method as well.
Yeah I may need to reach out to Ruud, I can’t make my curbstickle_lw account a mod at the moment, but I agree on the LUKS post - I’m going to be restoring it soon tbh. But I also need to run out to pick up dinner in a few, so that may be a little later in the evening :)
Edit: And agreed on the moderation overall, the only thing I really disagreed with is the strict application of rule 3.
but I agree on the LUKS post
How about we don’t and just say we did. That was embarrassing. However, I am happy to report it went smooth No runs, no drips, no errors. So I did learn something.
It seems to be completely gone now anyway.
I’m glad things went smoothly!
So I did learn something.
And that is exactly why I like keeping threads like that around - no embarrassment necessary IMO!
Thanks for your effort!
Thanks for the CV I guess…
Also happy to help. I’ve modded on Reddit a few times and agree with light touch to avoid all the dramatic junk.






