Here is my attempt to archive r/homelab before it went dark. Google says there about 92,400 results for site:reddit.com/r/homelab, I have 2098, that’s only about 2% of it. Maybe there is something of use to you in that 2%.
Please don’t webscrape, if you want all the data you can get the raw BDFR archive at https://archive.douwes.co.uk/reddit/homelab.tar or the live web version at https://archive.douwes.co.uk/reddit/homelab-web.tar
A lot are on discord, but the mods are looking at an official Lemmy alternative. At the moment lemmy.ml is having significant issues so I’m not sure how that’s impacting federation, but hopefully they improve their servers soon…
Personally I don’t think Lemmy is really a great alternative in its current state especially with servers being able to defederate other servers, meaning that users registered on Beehaw for example can’t now view communities hosted on lemmy.world which seems to entirely defeat the purpose to me…
I die inside every time I see discord of matrix used that lol. I feel like homelab users have more than enough processing power to run their own lemmy instance or maybe a forum. The beehaw situation really isn’t good. I suppose you could use lemmy like a forum though? I hope they get something sorted out though.
Processing power isn’t really the issue, but ensuring that whatever we do is stable & reliable (we can’t just run it off a server in my office, running a bot there is fine but a sub not so much), open (the de-federation issue) and not difficult to moderate (Not gone in to much detail but apparently it’s lacking)
fair, It just feels like we’re going back to centralisation if everything is on lemmy.world. What do mean about difficult to moderate? the instance or the community?
I’m not saying we would go down the lemmy.world route, but equally it wouldn’t be a home server, there are more reliable options, lemmy.world is struggling a little right now. For moderation I was specifically referring to the tools available to moderate the community, automod on reddit is very powerful and helps take the simpler tasks out of moderation that stop subs becoming spammed and botted messes, the API is very useful for moderation bots and there are some other useful tools, Lemmy isn’t close yet and will be a while off…
Edit: Sorry and yes I’m not a fan of discord either, it’s not got the knowledge retention like a reddit format where you can go back and pick up on a 2 year old conversation…
I get the moderation thing. I moderate a few tiny communities and the mod tools are pretty terrible. I run a couple bots but I wouldn’t even know where to start for a moderation bot, probably because I never modded on reddit.
Discord is a pain the the ass. it’s fine for chatting but support is terrible. You ask a useful question and someone posts le funny cat photo and suddenly no one ever response. It’s a bit better with threads but it’s still a chat app, not a forum. and sometimes it’s used for maintaining a list of links??? just link them on the webpage. I cannot fathom why so many communities migrated from forums to discord. literally none of the questions I have asked on big discords have been answered.
It’s a tough unpaid gig at the end of the day, hating on mods is pretty much a meme at this point in time especially on reddit and there’s a lot that goes on that 99% of users don’t see as it’s already been handled by mods or the tools in place. I know of several mods that are planning on leaving reddit entirely, not just because of the current situation (different sub BTW) as they have had enough and it’s just not good for their mental health and these are mods of over a decade.