this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
351 points (97.1% liked)

Selfhosted

56953 readers
1828 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I mostly lurk here, and I know we've had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord's age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren't seasoned self-hosters, and I've still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I'm missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer's self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it's looking like I'm leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kieron115@startrek.website 27 points 1 day ago (5 children)

What I'm upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums? Hell, even a subreddit would at least have been scrapable. If there's a mass migration away from Discord then all that information just gets lost. Example that Lemmings might care about - CachyOS has a forum, but I've seen the vast majority of troubleshooting and user input made on their Discord channel.

[–] other_cat@piefed.zip 2 points 5 hours ago

Maybe some people will migrate things back out. I wound up moving a bunch of stuff to a self hosted wiki.

[–] aquovie@lemmy.cafe 9 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Old fashioned forums are old fashioned. Circular logic but there's a lot holding them back.

  • Create a new account for every single niche forum? No thanks. We need a federated solution.
    • Lemmy/Piefed/etc is almost there
  • Antiquated restrictions (e.g. Log in to view images)
  • Antiquated UI - People want emojis, reactions, rich media, etc
  • PHP paid the bills once upon a time but now it's hard to get anyone excited to make big new features for forum software
[–] cdf12345@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

How hard would it be to create an open source identity token that would allow user authentication on any forum or site that will accept it?

Something with a public/private encryption system to authenticate users without the content needing to be federated.

[–] aquovie@lemmy.cafe 1 points 2 hours ago

You might be thinking of the original OpenID system. Instead of the OAuth2 thing we have now with OIDC (e.g. "Login with Google"), OpenID Connect didn't require the site to be configured in advance with the auth provider. You just gave it your email address and off you went.

OIDC is generally superior security-wise but it's held back by each site to establish a relationship with the upstream site.

[–] gdog05@lemmy.world 5 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

You've got some points but I would argue that antiquated UI will be what saves the Internet. Keeping out bots and AI scrapers with good old fashioned phpBBS systems that have been around for twenty years will be our clean data as we build systems outside of AI and the techbro properties.

[–] aquovie@lemmy.cafe 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I don't see how web 1.0 style sites are resistant to AI or bots. It's kind of the opposite. Bots/AI are really good at pure text stuff.

[–] gdog05@lemmy.world 1 points 44 minutes ago

Because they block access without signing up.

[–] other_cat@piefed.zip 5 points 5 hours ago

I've also always liked how old school forums are structured. Nice, neat categories and most active/recent stuff on top.

[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago

What I’m upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums?

Rather than paying for hosting and operational costs that goes with a forum, social media and the desire for immediacy happened as Yahoo created Groups, then Facebook followed suit with their own.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 11 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

What I'm upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord.

omg, you guys are almost there. you're so close, I can feel it.

so....why is the information locked behind a corporate entity?

almost got it

[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Because a open sourced self hosted solution like discord hadn't been created yet.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 0 points 3 hours ago

oh I'm sure something existed, it just wasn't popular enough.

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 7 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Because people prefer convenience to privacy and accessibility, I guess? If there was an easy way to scrape/crawl discord data I would be hoarding everything I could to repost on lemmy or something but AFAIK there are no easily automated ways to access it.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 8 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

and that's no accident. it's by design.

creating a community is neat, but many are started irresponsibly. they don't take into consideration how to move if things "change".

people just willingly and blindly trust corporate suppliers because they do "so much stuff". not a care in the world as day by day their dependency grows.

[–] TrippinMallard@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

That's why my side project energy has been focused on making decentralized solutions infrastructure more appliance-like reliability and boring. So app environment on top can have as close to equivalent advantage as centralized solutions.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

As a Giant Bomb fan, it's somewhat renewed interest in forums over there from the operators and users. Discord was always a bad forum anyway, but it was great for immediately being able to have a conversation with people to find answers to problems.