I’ve been selfhosting my video / photo / book collections for a while now and also running other services like personal bugeting, piehole DNS, and stuff like that.
Lately I’ve been working on the hardware side of my home network. I’m looking for some advice and normally I’d turn to one of the homelab communities. But the three communities I found hadn’t had much or any activity in the past 6 months.
I considered asking a question here related to my switch and my wifi access point. I bet there are lots of clever folks in this community. But before hitting submit I remembered to check the community rules in the side bar and noticed rule #3:
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing.
Where do all the lovely self-hosters here turn when they want to chat networking or server hardware? Anyone have some recommendations for neighbouring communities they find useful?
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Homelab is so 2025. We’re all building EMF pulsing devices in 2026 in preparation of the redacted.
Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in !selfhosted@lemmy.world when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don’t think that it’d be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.
However.
End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn’t the case for me for this at all or (b) there’s too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don’t want thrown at them. I think that there’s enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what’s covered that it’s probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren’t interested in or where their knowledge isn’t relevant.
Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like !games@lemmy.world still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like !shmups@lemmus.org.
I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. I tend to say “I’d like to have more traffic in the communities I’m in” than “there’s too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down”.
I agree with you there. It seems like communities need a certain mass to feel right and above or below that it’s time to split or consolidate.
I can imagine the mods making a rule like #3 to help avoid taking traffic from the hardware-specific communities.
homelab is a form of self-hosting and vice versa as far as I’m concerned. Ask away, I’ve never seen that rule being strictly enforced and I don’t think the lemmy community is honestly large enough to support such a rule. It was probably migrated over from Reddit where there were viable communities for all those things.
Most communities on here are basically dead tbf.
Might be wrong, not a mod. My interpretation is if youre discussing hardware in the context of self hosting itd be ok? But general hardware posts (like news, new products) arent appropriate
Dude is going to make his second post and get yanked. LOL
That’s my understanding too, and that way it ends up over there rather than here:
Create your post and put a notice saying it might not be under the rules. I agree with the previous post, the traffic is not overwhelming so the admins might let it stay. We’re human after all.
As for your question, I don’t think I have any community. I usually watch some hardware related channels on YT.YouTube has been useful. Mostly as a way to filter out unreliable info. I’ve had best luck with creators who have actually written out a guide and are then making a video companion for it. Anyone who goes through the trouble to do both tends to be serious about what they are talking about.
But it’s not a great way to ask questions and get answers. Hmmm, I say that, but to be honest I haven’t checked the comments on those videos. Maybe it is a good way to have a dialogue and I just haven’t seen it
Where do all the lovely self-hosters here turn when they want to chat networking or server hardware?
I know this might seem like a strange answer, but… IRC channels on private torrent trackers. Many of the people on these sites actively have large and complex setups running. There often is a lot of talk about hardware for servers and networking in those IRC channels. Or at least there is on the trackers I am on.
I know that’s not necessarily a helpful answer to anyone not already in the private torrent tracker community, since its often quite a task to get involved if you aren’t already. However, it’s one that I have had great success with, personally. To anyone who already is on a private torrent tracker, if you haven’t checked out the IRC, give it a shot and see.
Oh and don’t forget you can self-host The Lounge for a self-hosted web-based IRC client.
I kind of miss the message board era of the internet. Those niche communities could be really useful.
I’m still using public trackers. Maybe after I get my network setup I’ll invest some time into finding a good private tracker or two to join.
Private trackers are like the Matrix’s “zion”. When civilization collapses into a dystopian surveillance capitalism hellscape and the AIs and fascist governments take over the net, the last free humans will be hiding in private tracker communities, sharing freely and building a resistance. Will we have mechs with gatling guns? I don’t know, all I can say is I hope so because it looks like we’re going to need it.
You’re using public trackers, so you’re probably not in the habit of being a seeder. With private trackers, you HAVE to seed. Deleting a torrent from your client once it’s finished is most certainly a habit you will have to break once you finally do get into some private trackers.
@myfavouritename@lemmy.world If it is that huge problem on Lemmy, just get an Fediverse account and ask :floof_peek:
What is a fediverse account and how does it differ from have an account on the fediverse loke lemmy?
there are a large bunch spending time on Discord as well
Found a couple of them on SimpleX chat also, those you can find yourself in SimpleX directory: Linux, Selfhosting and homelab (I think)
Then there are some forums like Proxmox, Nextcloud and idk others, however these are scattered
Disgusting. Please remove your discord links. Discord is a surveillance platform that works with ICE.
I hadn’t considered checking out the communities for some of the widely used homelab applications like Proxmox. That’s a great idea, thanks.
