Visualized results from the 2024 Self-Host User Survey

Sad… Did not see the survey when it was running…

@Dave@lemmy.nz
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721M

Damn, and I thought the gender ratio on Lemmy was bad.

archomrade [he/him]
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171M

I do wonder how many within the man/woman responses are trans, too.

Idk if that survey was mainly advertised on lemmy, but i know that at least one instance that did a survey had maybe 2% woman respondents, but more than two thirds of those were transfem.

Either way, a little disconcerting. I’m not sure what to make of that or what (if anything) to do about it

Who cares if they are trans? The more interesting question is what would make women generally more likely to self host? More free time? Different applications? Actually having a job in IT? Being single?

archomrade [he/him]
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91M

You misunderstand, I only mean that it’s disconcerting that there may be some reason that cis-women do not find the hobby/group appealing

@inspxtr@lemmy.world
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121M

Wonder how the survey was sent out and whether that affected sampling.

Regardless, with -3-4k responses, that’s disappointing, if not concerning.

I only have a more personal sense for Lemmy. Do you have a source for Lemmy gender diversity?

Anyway, what do you think are the underlying issues? And what would be some suggestions to the community to address them?

Chewy
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11M

The survey was originally sent out on reddit /r/selfhosted, so I expect most respondents are from there.

@Dave@lemmy.nz
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51M

It’s hard to know overall for Lemmy, but I know that both Lemmy.ca and Lemmy.nz have surveyed their members.

https://lemmy.ca/post/15125231 https://lemmy.nz/post/12001861

Both were around 87% men, where as this selfhosting one is like 96% men.

I would guess it’s explained by society. Women are less likely to be in STEM which seems to almost be a prerequisite for Lemmy and possibly self-hosting, and of those women in STEM, and ( despite what you might think about your own house) there is still a societal expectation of them running the household and doing most of the household chores, even when they work full time. A third job, selfhosting, may be too much.

Possibly linux
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31M

I also think it depends on where you are. It is way more acceptable in the West to have equal roles.

Eh, the women I know in tech aren’t particularly interested in self-hosting. Not sure why, but women seem to have a stronger separation between work and hobbies, whereas the men I work with often do personal projects at home related to their work. I think the women I work with would be more than capable, they just seem uninterested.

Yeah, this is me. I refuse to get into work related hobbies, I just don’t want to get burned out

I think we are still in an age where few women were encouraged to do technical things growing up, and found those subjects later in school, university or work. I suspect that will change over the next ten years.

That’s also a huge part of it. Statistically, the women you see in technical positions probably picked it in college instead of being a hobby as a kid, so they see it more as a career than a hobby. Hopefully that’s the case, because I’d love to see more women get into it.

Possibly linux
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31M

The industry needs some diversity. Before it was all white men and now you can break down 80% of the industry into a few groups.

Agreed. It has gotten a lot better since I’ve been in the industry, but it still has a long way to go.

Possibly linux
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I also see some serious discrimination against women who don’t fall into the narrow stereotype. They better wear makeup and be all proper or else they are rejected. It is especially bad if you are on the spectrum. When people see an weird guy they think nerd and it is normal. However that is very much not the case for women. It is taboo for a woman not to be good with people.

@Dave@lemmy.nz
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41M

Possibly related to the whole mental load thing: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

When you have two jobs you don’t really want a third.

Yeah, I totally get that.

However, the women in my workplace either aren’t married or have no kids. They just don’t want to do “work stuff” outside of work hours, so I don’t think that comic really applies.

Personal experience w/ SO about similar realization

Over the past year or two, my wife has gotten really stressed by the kids, so I (male) have taken over a lot of the tasks involving the kids. I make breakfast and lunch and drop the kids at school every day, then more often than not make dinner when I finish work, and I put the kids to bed every night. My wife is a SAHM, but she’s had a ton of issues with anxiety recently, so she’s mostly been caring for the youngest (4yo) and picking up the others from school. All the kids are quite independent now and mostly play with the neighbors, and she makes dinner 1-2x/week. I do almost all of the shopping, laundry, dishes, etc, but she still stresses about those despite not doing much of it (again, anxiety).

We have a very different way of working on household tasks. When I’m short on time, I do the urgent things first and intentionally ignore the less important details to be handled later (usually the weekend). When she is short on time, she’ll stay up late and do all the details while also doing the important things, then she’s burnt out for the next few days (understandable) and things degrade back to where they were. I think the average level of tidiness and amount of work is similar between our approaches.

So she has essentially retained the mental load, even though I’ve taken the lion’s share of the actual work. Just seeing a mess stresses her out, whereas for me, a mess is just an obstacle that I can work around in the short-term. It’s not that I don’t see the mess, just that I’m a lot more focused on the task than the broader picture.

My thought is that this is a bunch of latent guilt stemming from her upbringing. She grew up in an E. Asian household, with all of the social expectations and whatnot, so when she sees a mess, she takes it as a personal attack on not being a good enough home maker. I had a similar upbringing, where my mom stayed home w/ us kids and my dad was the sole breadwinner. However, when I was a teenager, my mom started to work outside the house and my dad was able to WFH more, so they shared the household responsibilities a bit more (she still did laundry and shopping, but my dad did more cooking and dishes). My in-laws have had a similar transition (MIL works, FIL takes SS and doesn’t work), but my MIL still keeps the same responsibilities she always had.

So, I’ve been trying to have things a bit more complete, even if in just one area, rather than spreading efforts around the house, and it seems to have a much bigger impact on her anxiety than what I would normally do. I’ve also listed all of the household chores, and we’ll be assigning explicit responsibility of tasks to the kids (they had them as chores, but there was no formal handover of responsibility), as well as offering the kids incentives to take on additional tasks (in our case, that means spending money). My goal is to reduce her mental load and enable her to think about things outside of the home to hopefully get over the anxiety issues she’s been facing.

To me, this totally confirms the gist of that post. Taking away the work of a task still leaves the mental load of that task.

That said, I think there’s something more here though. I think men see work as a end in itself, whereas women see it as a means to an end (i.e. men want to hunt despite it being less efficient, because the trophy is the point). I’m sure there’s a ton of variability there, but I wonder if there’s more than just culture at play here (i.e. the above mentality also makes sense in a hunter/gatherer context; men do the big, showy things, while women do the consistent work of the tribe). I don’t know, what I do know is that none of the women I know have hobbies that are similar to the work they do, even if they find their work to be fulfilling.

𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
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-61M

I am disappointed …

@Owljfien@lemm.ee
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231M

I don’t want to accidentally cache some no-no content that gets me turbofucked by the law, sure I could probably defend if it ever came up but that’s a stress i dont even want the possibility of having in my life

Why? I’m not particularly interested in ActivityPub, I just use Lemmy because it’s the closest thing to Reddit w/o being Reddit. Once a better alternative shows up, I’m out.

I’m happy to throw some money at the admin of my instance, I’m not interested in hosting something myself, especially when things can break when different instances are on different versions.

@Korkki@lemmy.world
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-11M

What the hell is an ActivityPub platform?

Something Burger 🍔
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81M

ActivityPub is the protocol powering the Fediverse. Platforms include Lemmy, Mastodon and Pixelfed.

@Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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21M

What are some interesting things to host?

𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
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11M

The usual suspects: Mastodon (or mastodon-compatible servers like GoToSocial), PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc.

@Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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31M

I just don’t see the use of self hosting these just for myself. I guess that’s why so little people do this?

I sort of get it. When you self host mastodon or lemmy, you have to deal with the moderation that comes with it. That’s a headache unless you have a ton of free time. Judging by the age distribution, I’m guessing most of us just want things to work so we can do what we enjoy.

𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
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11M

You can run those as single-user instances or with approval of users so you can use those instances for your family and/or friends only.

@helenslunch@feddit.nl
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11M

Not just moderation, but you are responsible for all content on your server, some of which may be illegal and hosting it is a IRL crime, but the sheer size of it is impossible to filter.

Happy Cake Day (Are we doing this here on Lemmy?)

@helenslunch@feddit.nl
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11M

Thanks

SK
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31M

@CosmicTurtle0 hosting a single user federated blog is also an option, you are only responsible for yourself and your friends you host. Not necessary to host public.

𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
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21M

federated blog

I wonder what federated blog (or publishing platform) isn’t stuck in pre-Docker era, though.

SK
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01M

@𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬

pre-Docker era

you mean bare metal deployments?

𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
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11M

Yeah. While I can dockerize those applications, all I checked out lack modern features and concepts/designs. It all feels heavily outdated technology-wise.

SK
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11M

@𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬 I think thats the fun of it, different people building tools as per their knowledge/requirements, with time i’m sure someone will make something that you might find suitable :)

archomrade [he/him]
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I know ghost has a container deployment and uses activity pub

@Valmond@lemmy.world
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161M

Lemmy uses activity pub right? 200 in a survey hosting similar stuff is not that bad IMO.

@Allero@lemmy.today
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91M

It’s alright! We don’t all have to host our own instance. Existing ones can easily accommodate hundreds of users.

Really interesting to scroll through and see. Picked up a couple of new tools to look into, too, thanks!

@jimmy90@lemmy.world
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41M

no matrix instances!!??

“What is your favorite self-hosted application?” had what looks to be about 15 matrix responses.

Would potentially be interesting to see Matrix/XMPP/etc prevalence in future surveys, maybe replacing ‘what activitypub apps’ with a more generic ‘what federated apps do you self-host’

@jimmy90@lemmy.world
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11M

oh it did? i missed that scrolling through the results somehow, thanks!

d00phy
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431M

I think this is pretty troubling. Including myself in the sentiment that the self-hosting community needs to do better. Aside from funding individual projects, are there any organizations that help fund self-hosting projects?

How so? 40%-ish is actually pretty good!

I’m also in the “no” bucket, but I’ve contributed bug reports and do intend to donate soonish now that I use more visible projects (used to just be minidlna, BTRFS, and openSUSE). I only added Jellyfin a few months ago, and I do intend to donate since I don’t intend to report bugs or contribute code.

d00phy
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41M

True, it’s a good percentage, and probably better than most free software. That said, given the communities the self hosted apps support, their excitement for the products, and for some the essential nature of some of these apps, it would be nice to see the yes/no number more 50/50 at least.

I’m more interested in dollar amounts. Are people sending $5 every now and then, or is there more consistent funding?

@Alk@sh.itjust.works
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41M

I have subscribed to a couple projects on github (the recurring payment thing) and purchased the optional immich license. I think the immich license is a great model, and more projects should do it.

Agreed. Grayjay has something similar, though it’s not actually FOSS (it’s source-available though). I’m happy to pay for software, but donating somehow has a different feel to it and doesn’t feel as “necessary.” So yes, an optional license fee would be awesome for more projects and could encourage more people to actually pay.

@Alk@sh.itjust.works
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21M

I love that it doesn’t unlock any features, but it does prominently display in the app as “activated” or whatever. It feels like “yeah, I have paid my portion, I am now entitled to use this forever guilt-free”

Are people sending $5 every now and then

That’s still better than nothing I guess

Sure, but it doesn’t really pay the bills.

I don’t wanna ask if and how much individuals contributed to the ones that host their instances ;)

Derin
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11M

Yeah, really don’t get this one. As an example, I’ve been supporting the guy who writes most of the software I use via Github sponsors for a while, now. It’s nice to get access to additional support chat rooms and perks and stuff, but just the feeling alone is satisfying enough.

Feelsgoodman.jpg

I genuinely recommend those with gainful employment to consider supporting the people who make the software and media you like (E.g. Patreon).

Issue reports and the likes are nice, but they’re really not a substitute for cash (in my opinion).

I’m in the no-bucket, but instead i spend time on issues, helping the community and sometimes code contributions to self hosted projects instead.

This is not taken into the account of the question, however, but should be considered as contributing.

(I also consider donating to be contributing.)

d00phy
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21M

Agreed. I’m not much of a coder, so the best contribution I can give is probably $$. At least until I get off my ass and learn something new!

Possibly linux
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31M

I also think that it is up to the developers to make it sustainable

If they want funding they need to seek it. It has been shown that when a project has a one time donation popup they can raise a significant amount of money. They aso could sell products or services.

@DrDystopia@lemy.lol
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11M

100% of my self-hosted projects are run exclusively by my recurrent donations.

Good thing nobody’s asking about what I’ve donated to the software projects I’m using to self-host.

@helenslunch@feddit.nl
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41M

There’s a fundamental problem with FOSS culture that anyone who asks for money is seen negatively. Which I get, but also, I think the other edge of the sword, depending on donations, is worse, because ad-driven and freemium companies like Google and Meta have created a culture of entitlement. Ideally they would set up a 501c3 like Signal or Ghost, but obviously that can be cost and time-prohibitive.

Possibly linux
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21M

I wish there were more commercial services around Foss. (And I don’t mean proprietary)

They could do all sorts of things like sell swag and support.

@helenslunch@feddit.nl
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11M

Exactly. Pop OS is funded by hardware sales (though they do accept donations as well).

Possibly linux
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11M

I’m pretty sure that Pop OS isn’t the product but I absolutely see what you are saying. I’m talking about things like commercial support for companies and maybe some sort of user facing service but I’m not sure how that would work.

@helenslunch@feddit.nl
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Yeah that works as well. Matrix is supported that way. As does Rocket Chat and I’m sure plenty of others.

Possibly linux
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The sad part about Matrix is that it isn’t supported, it is used. I think the blame is about 50/50. Users should donate and the leadership shouldn’t of assumed that companies would give them money.

@Gg901@lemmy.world
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11M

Greetings, i noticed Linux is the most popular OS by a majority amount. Which Linux OS is probably the most used and why is this? Is Linux prefered to host ZFS Samba shares rather than tailored OS’s like Unraid, Trunas, OMV?

Wat?

@retro@infosec.pub
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121M

I only need to send sign up and password reset emails for Jellyfin, I don’t need to receive any emails back.

🖖USS-Ethernet
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Which service are you using for this?

Saik0
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21M

Use anything… Mailcow or otherwise. Just don’t expose the ports on your firewall/router to connect back to you.

I meant more like… which server part are you hosting. Answer: Client…

@tapdattl@lemmy.world
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91M

You could self host a web client

The question before was “Are you self-hosting any components of an e-mail server?” and if you answered “No” you didn’t get to choose the client. And a webmail client is not part of what I consider an email server component without context.

But the survey also has other questions that are not clear enough. Like “Do you deploy a network-attached storage device (NAS)?” - what do they mean by NAS? As soon as I have network shares on it, it can be considered as a NAS. Do they mean all in one solutions like Synology or Qnap? Then why not make that more clear?

I can’t see any of the graphs. The show as a black box.

This despite disabling Canvas Blocker on the page for testing. According to my briwser, loading the resources from “cdn.jsdelivr.net” is blocked due to a CORS failure.

Aren there by any chance image dumps of the charts in any normal graphics image format? Or even jpeg-xl, for variety.

@filcuk@lemmy.zip
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81M

How does one self-host Obsidian? Does that just mean file sync? What am I missing?

@Alk@sh.itjust.works
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21M

The plug in “self hosted livesync” most likely. You need a couchdb server for it.

@Alk@sh.itjust.works
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https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1eo7knj/guide_obsidian_with_free_selfhosted_instant_sync/

I just set this up yesterday, coincidentally. I have it behind a reverse proxy + subdomain so I and my wife can share notes easily wherever we are. Mainly shopping lists, projects, and other things.

@filcuk@lemmy.zip
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11M

Oh that’s brilliant, thanks

@Alk@sh.itjust.works
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11M

You’re welcome! If you use unraid, you can also skip docker compose and use the “official” docker container from couchdb, see my comment in that thread for more info.

shnizmuffin
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531M

Shout out to my fellow “None Backup Strategies” chaos goblins.

@lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com
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“What is your gender?”

82 females, 3300 males…

Ah guys, where are the females?

I’m a woman who does some self hosting. Hi.

removed by mod

@jozza@lemmy.world
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201M

Wtf?

JustEnoughDucks
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191M

And ladies and gentlemen, that is part of the reason for the gender gap lol

@PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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11M

deleted by creator

@jwt@programming.dev
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141M

Btw also an awesome way of telling people you’re pregnant.

Lemongrab
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-61M

Hmm, you have typed words that I do not vibe with.

Possibly linux
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31M

Sad trombone noises

@nadiaraven@lemmy.world
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31M

Lol. For kids I won’t self host, I’ll pay for someone else to host

Possibly linux
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gif

@ikidd@lemmy.world
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31M

Must be our fault.

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