I got kind of excited about the mention of the “social” aspect, but it turned out a bit nonexistent. Funkwhale seems to be just a way to set up a file sharing site for music.
Well, as someone who has been trying to launch a functioning Lemmy instance for nearly a year now, I can tell you, knowing not the slightest thing about funkwhale, that I would eat my hat if the documentation isn’t an all but absent shit show.
My favorite part was learning that my domain was creating a completely new cert from lets encrypt with each deployment and no way of recovering them at all. So after 5 attempts, you have to wait 60 days (or whatever) for them to expire. That was awesome. I messaged the devs about that one and they literally said “we didn’t think of that”… 😑
And so much shit goes tits up if you don’t deploy it perfectly the very first time. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fediverse, but JTFC I hate the fucking fediverse.
I don’t know, maybe it seems that you are experiencing a lot of the pains that comes with learning about self-hosting, which is fine and laudable but not at all an issue exclusive to Fediverse software.
Maybe my question is: are you trying to deploy your Lemmy for this long for the learning process, or do you just want to have a server of your own? If the latter, why not just go one of the hosting providers?
Look, I hear what you’re saying. And no offense intended, but people like you crow about things like fediverse not being supported… All the while, these applications are not supported by their own developers. And unfortunately, not unlike the majority of my experiences with Linux issues, every time I reach out for help I’m told the same old hat story, “this isn’t meant for beginners”.
And the “pains that come with learning about self-hosting” are so unnecessary and in my opinion quite apparently avoidable.
"Well, did you change the port number to this number that isn’t referenced anywhere in the documentation? It’s pretty obvious to anyone that’s been doing this for 20 years - who would be able to recognize that it’s a step everyone would need to do to deploy - so there’s literally no conceivable reason why that would be included…
###IN THE TUTORIAL
…Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this."
Look, this is software that has not even reached version 1.0. Of course it is incomplete. I totally understand your frustration, but if people are telling you “this is not for beginners”, maybe it would be wise to listen to it? You still haven’t answered my question: are you trying to run your own instance to learn or because you want “support the Fediverse”? If the former, it seems that you are trying to bite more than you can chew. If the latter, there are plenty of other ways to help beyond running your own instance.
is this like a decentralised plex for music? like if i have a set of flac i can simply create an instance, upload those and use that instance with my friends like a spotify?
Needs a mobile app
The first step would be understanding what portion of listeners fit the use case you’re trying to solve.
I’m an example that doesn’t. I have no interests in the social functionality but do want a large catalog of essentially everything. You’re not likely to attract someone like me, regardless of how good the project may be. So are most of role like you or most people like me?
The “problems” I am trying to solve are a bit like bug #1 on Ubuntu’s Issue tracker:
- I don’t want to have an Internet which is accessible to large majority of people through “platforms” controlled by large corporations.
- Surveillance Capitalism is a net negative for society. People should be able to access services without having to give up their privacy.
- The attention-based economy has caused terrible damages to civil debate, media institutions are no longer focused on factual reporting and depend on polarization, emotional manipulation of issues and only report on things that are favorable or inoffensive to the Status Quo.
- Because of increased automation, knowledge workers will be increasingly pushed out of meaningful and well-paying jobs and will be forced to try to monetize every aspect of their life. There are no more hobbies, everything is a “hustle” or a “side project”.
I hoped that all the things that I’ve worked on with Communick were made to the sense of mitigating these problems.
- Provide open source platforms which can be self-hosted, but do not demand users to become part-time admins.
- Instead of ad-based revenue, make a honest value proposition: I offer a service, people pay to use it.
- Create a system where people can allocate a budget to support artists and free/libre developers, to foment a reconstruction of a more open culture.
