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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
I, a real normal human person, would consume the turtle with my regular bone teeth, in the usual fashion.
… but every page becomes blank just before you touch it.
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.
The RFID tags do sound like a fun idea - though I’m not sure it’s worth it just for me… Interesting mid ground between physical media and stored files though!
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.
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.