fen

I said I'd talk about Lemmy/kbin and this is that post.

Back in June of this year, just before the Reddit blackouts and just after the news had come out about the API pricing changes, I'd made the decision to spin up my own Lemmy instance because this was the tipping point where a declining Reddit was no longer fit for me. I genuinely did get a lot of news via Reddit, and it was my go-to just-absently-browsing-the-internet platform of choice, which meant finding a replacement was something I was interested in doing. Most of my browsing was on mobile via Boost for Reddit, which of course was going to be one of the third-party apps impacted by and shutting down because of the astronomical API rate hike. I figured, why wait until I'm actually locked out after June 30 when the change would go into effect, let's get this show on the road.

By this point there are a number of reddit-like content aggregator platforms – Tildes, Raddle, technically HackerNews fits (blergh), components of Hive, and of course Lemmy and kbin, just to name a few. Tildes was out since I wasn't planning on jumping out of one situation where I was at the mercy of the administration to another (and it was invite-only). Raddle has the ability to be self-hosted and has a number of instances, but they're more like private forums and aren't interlinked. The last two were the ones that interested me most because of their ActivityPub compatibility and ability to federate with other instances. This makes a ton of sense for an instance with a small userbase (ie me, maybe a couple friends) since we won't be running a whole community or hardly even our own sub. At least at its start, it would just be a portal, albeit one I could control.

I loved the ideas behind kbin and the direction it was going, but unfortunately it was still pretty young and relatively feature incomplete – it had been started mid-2021, had more or less a single dev working on it, and I don't think it has a proper functioning instance until either late 2022 or early 2023. The project was very clear about being essentially in an alpha state. Even a couple months later at the time of this writing, it has really poor tools for administration, but that's the nature of software in alpha.

Lemmy was a little older, dating back to early 2019, and had been functional for a couple years by this point. Even before the big push the API changes were getting ready to make, I'd seen it mentioned previously as a Reddit alternative, though never paid it much mind. While I didn't necessarily care for the politics of Lemmy's version of Website Boy, having my own self-hosted instance meant I could still control my interface, and it was more complete on the features I wanted. Namely control of registrations and easy deployment and updating.

Mind you, back at this point in June, I'd only been self-hosting my Akkoma instance for about 5 weeks. Tiny baby fen just now set afloat on her own raft and it kinda actually working out was great. It was a little unexpected, actually. I had genuinely planned that I'd probably migrate back to my @fencore@tech.lgbt account after my 30 day migration cooldown was up from the first move, but I was in love then and still am now.

So anyway, deployment and getting federation and all that jazz up and running was relatively simple using the Ansible playbook. I did put the Lemmy instance on its own droplet so as to not risk impacting my Akkoma instance (I hadn't yet moved Akkoma to its own docker container). Everything more or less worked out of the box, so top marks for all that.

A couple weeks afterward a new major release was made available, and likewise, updating was fairly simple. Perfect.

“Fen,” you say, “sounds like everything's great, but you killed your instance. What's the deal?”

Great question, fake person I made up. The problem was me! And not in the usual “I identify as a menace” kind of problem I like to be on most days, but in this case really came down to a fundamental difference in how I used a platform like a link aggregator compared to what I do on Akkoma/microblogging.

I absolutely hesitate to call anything I do “creation” of any kind. Akkoma fits my needs in being able to be what some people might call “funny” while making connections to people. In fact, the focus is the people at either end, and fostering conversations. I have personal things I post about, but people wouldn't consider following me for whatever project I'm in to, because then they'd basically die of relevant content hunger when I never post about it again. I, naturally, was not conducive to the algorithm on Twitter, but have absolutely found my niche on fediverse via microblogging algorithm-free and making legitimate connections with very good people.

This runs counter to how a link aggregation platform is meant to be used. The whole angle of link aggregation is “here's a thing, discuss it” in a kind of meta sort of fashion. The golden age of Reddit really thrived because of content then being created specifically for the platform, and not just linked or shared to it. The part of me that enjoys reading and learning absolutely craves that sort of informational uptake. Read a thing, and then hit the comments to see what sort of interesting stories and perspectives there are. Good stuff.

The issue is that I don't interact well in that kind of space. In my 12ish years on Reddit I'd made a few hundred comments and only...3? 4? of my own posts. And over the past two months on Lemmy I think maybe 6-8 comments total? My point being is that in that space, I am absolutely a consumer, not a contributor. Though this consumption did help in a lot of ways – realizing I am trans and being able to read the stories of other trans people via r/transgender and laugh along with people like me on r/traaaaaaa and r/egg_irl really helped to make me feel a little more like I belonged. That kind of stuff was what was really tough to walk away from. Even still though, I have a hard time with “hey look at me I made this thing or have this idea to share” one shot deal that creators on that kind of platform take to. There's probably some things there I need to talk to a therapist about.

The whole point of this self-hosting journey has been to take control, specifically of:

1. My data
2. My interface with the internet and the space I occupy in it.

As it turn out, while I learned a lot in the process of creating my Lemmy instance, it functionally served neither of those two end goals.

What data was there to control, truly? I hardly commented or posted. I didn't moderate a community and I had no interest in doing so.

What benefit did I get in controlling my interface? I could just as easily block from my individual account as I could my instance, and I wasn't really aiming to build a community of people that I could extend that courtesy to. I could just as easily subscribe and self-moderate from any other instance.

And, on top of that, there were some flaws in the software that are just a factor of its development state. A content aggregator actually really needs a good algorithm to handle surfacing and decay of new posts to keep the main feed moving, especially a feed federated across countless instances. Lemmy's is not in a good state, leaving posts that are weeks or months old near the top of the feed. Kbin's is marginally better, but not enough to make a difference. Because of this, I found myself over time wanting to access it less and less and when I would I wasn't enjoying the time I was spending there.

Ergo, Shork Online is dead. I cut my server for the instance, I made a backup which I'll probably can in a week or two, and moved my subscriptions to kbin.social and will probably use that as home base for the few times I feel like I want to check up on what's happening on the threadiverse (it's all Linus Tech Tips drama this week, unsurprisingly, and this parenthetical will absolutely date this post terribly. By the way, hate the term threadiverse).

The platforms still have a lot of maturing to do and I think will eventually be in a really good space, but even then I don't foresee myself spinning up another instance. This experiment taught me a lot about what has value for me personally on this project, and I feel it was very much worthwhile to gain that knowledge, even if the instance itself didn't last long.

And thanks to @andyy@tech.lgbt for putting up with the worst administrator (me) who still never had email notifications running the entire time the instance existed. Glad you never forgot your password.