A couple days ago, someone posted on /0 (the meta community for the Divisions by zero) that the incoming federation from lemmy.world (the largest lemmy instance by an order of magnitude) is malfunctioning. Alarmed, I started digging in, since a federation problem with lemmy.world will massively affect the content my community can see. As always [...]
I didn’t want to devalue your communication, I think I have worded my previous comment very badly in that sake, I am sorry about that. (I also really need to go to sleep so I will be blunt here.)
There is a nuance to the internet communication when it comes to asking OSS community for support, at least speaking from my own experience as someone working in tech.
Getting one or two people actively bouncing ideas of off is a already big success - quality of OSS support is often very spotty across projects and it’s understandable because people do it in their free time which is limited (also if the project is complex, there is often less people experienced with it, less total sum of free time for support, I think this currently applies to Lemmy a lot).
With that in mind, when I come asking for support I am mostly prepared to not get any, I am prepared to have to dive into the codebase, debug, deconstruct, debug, swear, swear some more. Maybe this is just me and I had really bad luck mostly, but I don’t know.
Should the devs/owners of any OSS project be ready to provide (some) support for their product if they want it to survive, probably yes, and how much is good depends on the project, you, anyone.
So
My opinion is that currently, lemmy is simply not ready for non-tech people. (And I can’t really imagine it will ever be, unless there is a lot of people active in the development and are willing to help others. At least currently there is just too much moving parts that require at least some amount of technical experience. Also lemmy is not something like… GUI application - some application to be used by non-tech people, in the sense that if you want to deploy your own lemmy instance you the admin is the target user of that software, not talking about UX/UI)
Also as someone else has commented here, hosting something for myself is easy, hosting for friends is just a slightly bit harder, but hosting something for the public, getting hundreds-thousands of people makes it by a magnitude a lot more difficult (now you need active monitoring, durable backups, …).
You surely noticed that I was more than prepared to get my hands dirty during this incident. 😉
When I speak about support, I don’t mean having people doing it for me.
But overall you don’t seem to disagree with me that hosting you lemmy is not for the non-technical. Which is what nutomic took issue with.
I read it as them taking isssue with you having different infra then recommend/expected, more then (not) being non-tech friendly. (I am going to sleep right now, I will check in tommorrow, well today later).