Is this a surprise? User retention is hard, and I'd expect this to hit even harder as time goes by. It'll keep going up until the point where user growth matches attrition and I'd guess in the early days of a social platform, it's going to take a while for background growth to increase that much and attrition will be pretty high given the lack of attachment.

Accidentally hitting reply-to-all on a company wide email and more or less stating that I wanted to be transferred to another team.

There was a new team forming elsewhere, and in fairness, it was a great opportunity in a lot of ways. But... I didn't get the transfer until another batch of jobs opened a few months later.

That... was a long few months.

The language in the article does seem to forget that plenty of early smartphones had replaceable batteries... Yeah, it might add some bulk, but it's not exactly going to be a major hardship.

... but it seems like a good reverse step to me. Any consumer replaceable part is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Fun fact: your known bug count is super low if you don't test properly.

Had something along these lines - a mail server that ended up used almost exclusively for sending automated internal emails. We'd migrated to a third party for email sending because managing DNS etc for clients got pretty painful. Mail server got removed by the tech lead and repointed to our third party mail provider without telling anyone, and 3 days into the months we'd hit our billing limit, on the lead's day off. Turns out that one service had been sending an order of magnitude more email than all of our other services put together, as someone had been using email as a logging method.

That was a... fun day.

I, a real normal human person, would consume the turtle with my regular bone teeth, in the usual fashion.

Two main points personally:

• with self-moderation, you can't really say "I don't want to see this sort of content", you can only say "I don't want to see this content again". A well stated set of rules for a community let's you know what to expect, so you get to make that choice if advance. This is a massive difference in preventing distress and general unpleasant feelings. It's not absolutely necessary, but it's a lot nicer.
• it avoids massive duplication of effort. If you have a moderator-to-reader ratio of 1000:1, you'll be saving the vast majority of self moderation with those people would be doing. Yes, reporting exists, but it's a tiny fraction of the time one would spend "moderating" for yourself

In the 13 years I've had a Reddit account, I made 40 comments, and 4 posts.

In the 15 days I've had a Lemmy account, I've made 28 comments and 1 post.

Now I wouldn't want to be one for extrapolating from data of different timescales, but...

The protocol would seem unlikely to satisfy the concept of "necessary". It's entirely possible for the protocol to be impossible to implement whilst not complying with GDPR. Might require the development of something more sharded - data pulling in real time, etc.

Glad someone made this point. My next printer will definitely be a tank printer. It's basically flipping the business proposal back to "pay for the printer up front" instead of "pay for the printer whenever you buy ink". My current printer was cheap enough that I basically spend enough on ink to buy a new printer every few years, given degradation of cartridges when they're left after opening.

Haha, yeah, I totally have proper backups...

I'd get in the car and start driving. I'd go and have the conversation I've been afraid to have for years

... or I'd be paralyzed with fear like I've been for the rest of my life.

... or if I'm being honest, I'd most likely grab a bottle of tequila, fall off the wagon, and find out what I actually want to do that way.

I've got a mix of hosting environments personally. A dedicated box hosted with Hetzner (their auction prices can be pretty decent) plus a Pi 4 and an old NAS for internal services. Docker containers used for pretty much everything - mostly set up with a big ol’ /opt/ folder with a bunch of service specific folders with docker-compose.yml files and bind mounts galore. Got a wireguard VPN bridging between then because that seemed sensible.

Running Portainer for some extra management and monitoring, then a bundle of stuff:

• Mailcow for email
• Owncloud for for sync and storage
• Phototropism
• Bitwarden
• Emby for media playback
• NextPVR for recording
• Private instances of Pleroma and Lemmy
• A slightly broken telegram/grafana stack with some container monitoring stuff hooked in
• The odd dedicated game server when the need arises ... and some things I've forgotten about.

Got a spare old i5 machine around set up to auto hook into Portainer if I need some extra grunt at some point, but it's more likely to be used when I can't be bothered paying for the dedicated box.

Aware a lot of it's suboptimal, but it's easy to work with and familiar, and that's enough to make it workable.

Up until now I've been using docker and mostly manually configuring by dumping docker compose files in /opt/whatever and calling it a day. Portainer is running, but I mainly use it for monitoring and occasionally admin tasks. Yesterday though, I spun up machine number 3 and I'm strongly considering setting up something better for provisioning/config. After it's all set up right, it's never been a big problem, but there are a couple of bits of initial with that are a bit of a pain (mostly hooking up wireguard, which I use as a tunnel for remote admin and off-site reverse proxying.

Salt is probably the strongest contender for me, though that's just because I've got a bit of experience with it.

The most interesting part of this personally is the murky nature of "hosting" in the fediverse. This sort of thing could happen, bit I think it's likely to lead to defederation. Content is easily argued as being "hosted" on any instance where that content ends up getting viewed. As such, anything of dubious legality is a surefire way to have site admins refuse to associate with you.

Ditto with Mailcow - easy enough to set up, and has worked well enough for setting up multiple domains etc.

Ditto with Caddy. Been using it for a couple of years now and it's made life a lot simpler. Config format isn't always obvious, but for most of the cases I've needed, a standard 3 line snippet gives you a reverse proxy with automatic working HTTPS with valid certificates.

Thanks for the heads up! Notification set, interested to see what's shown...

LMS has been on my list of things to check out for a while, though looking at a few other suggestions, mopidy is looking like a strong choice - if I can get it set up both look at Jellyfin (starting a slow migration already...) and accept streams over DLNA, then it should cover a good portion of what I'd want.

As a self-hoster, I attempted installs of both. They both had somewhat broken installation guides for Docker installs. Spent a night failing to get kbin running and pivoted and for Lemmy working in a couple of hours. Wish I had some big fancy reason, but kbin was just shortly more of a pain to sort.

I go with New personally, though I don't subscribe to all that much - I imagine that it would be a bit less pleasant if you're on a hundred different communities.

Those are reasonable options - though I'm pessimistic enough to believe that trolls will get better than every automated system, so we'd probably want some manual options. I wouldn't say it's not possible - just would require quite a bit of work, and would likely be an ongoing battle to improve your auto-moderator.

It feels like I'm moving the goalposts, so apologies, but your response got me thinking further. The other big advantages I can think of for central censorship is that it can actually prevent hosting of content - which has two benefits:

• legal concerns - make countries will require the removal of some amount of content - extreme stuff of all the usual sorts. Some jurisdictions will also require minors being prevented from accessing certain content, at least to a reasonable degree - refusing to host that kind of content is an easy solution.
• community unity and protection - is a lot more abstract, age debatable - but I'd contest that central moderation can give a certain "this content isn't wanted in our community" that individual censorship won't. Really difficult to define, though.

... but every page becomes blank just before you touch it.