Isn’t that what communities and subreddits are for?
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Phlogiston@lemmy.world 9 months agothis implies that servers should focus, like on news, tech, extreme sports, or whatever. rather than trying to be the hub for all topics the way reddit and others are?
vonbaronhans@midwest.social 9 months ago
WheeGeetheCat@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
What I’m envisioning is smaller communities that aren’t open to everyone like school / family / friends based communities.
After making the above comment I started reading about self hosting a lemmy instance with the idea that I might run one for my relatives and I to share photos, plan vacations, help w homework etc
shagie@programming.dev 9 months ago
Do you need the persistence? threading? federation? Or would spinning up an instance of Zulip ( zulip.com ) with only your family as provisioned accounts on it work better?
WheeGeetheCat@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
zuiip could work I think. Hadn’t heard of it / considered it before now.
shagie@programming.dev 9 months ago
Private slack channels work, but the reduced access to archives now makes that less useful. Spinning up a Zulip instance for family and then using that is quite tempting.
For most non-tech type people, the active asynchronous chat is an easier thing to work with than threaded discussions. And sharing images tends to be something more ephemeral / point in time. You could have a thread in zulip for “Smith Family vacation photos - summer 2023” and then follow that… but the "do you really want to be digging through those a year or two later? They’re still there, but how do you want them?
The other part is the… reduced moderation. Having worked with Stack Overflow Teams, the college intern thinking it’s funny to down vote everyone’s posts… well, that’s not funny. Cousin Charlie doing the same on a family Lemmy can create much more drama than you’d want to administer… and Aunt Jane thinks that it’s just boys being boys and doesn’t see anything wrong with it. Family drama is the worst drama.
This is why the least feature rich system that you need would work best. It’s just chat. No votes, no reporting and minimal administration and moderation because you really don’t want to deal with that.