rglullis

We used Slack and we had a Confluence Wiki. No one bothered to keep Confluence up-to-date because everyone was just used to ask ad-hoc questions on Slack and get an answer by one of the respective team members. We "solved" this issue at one company with one reasonably simple policy: people were free to ask questions on Slack as much as they wanted, but the response should always have a link to the related Confluence page. You could even answer the question directly with a TL;DR, but the Confluence Page link should always be part of the answer.

Every time that there was an Slack response without a link to Confluence, the responder's team would get a mark, and every month the team with the most marks would have to bring something to the rest of the company. Basically, it forced everyone in the team to step up their documentation game, and it got everyone in the spirit of "collaborative editing": sometimes, people would just write create a page with a very basic paragraph. Another team member would use that to extend the answer and so on. In just a few months, every department had a pretty solid documentation space and we even got used to start our questions with "I looked for X on Confluence and didn't find anything. Can someone tell me where I can find info about it?"

So, yes, you are right about the disconnect between "what experienced people want" and "what beginners want", but even in this case it would make sense if most project managers used real-time chat platforms only for initial inquiries and triage, but used this inflow to produce long-term content in a structured document or wiki.

Do you believe then that all the work from people here is pointless, and that people are just going to leave Lemmy for the next new shiny thing?

I worry that you may be right, but at the same time I can not avoid the "History repeats itself. First as tragedy then as farce":

• How many times have people said "if you are not paying for the product, you are the product", yet continue to use ad-based (or data-mining) "free" services?
• How many times have we seen "good" startups become "evil" monopolies?
• How many times have we seen people feigning outrage at some company that abused their position but didn't do anything because of "how convenient their product is" or "how cheap is has made something?" Complained about the "gig economy", but went on to order food via some app?

It frustrates me to no end to think that the average Lemmy user is carrying a very expensive iPhone, yet can not be bothered to contribute even $1/month to the developers. It honestly makes me think sometimes that they deserve all the shit that keeps happening. It's not for lack of warning.

Discord won because (...)

I'm pretty that they had valid reasons to have achieved such a dominant position in the market. But we can say the same about every other platform. Facebook, Reddit, Microsoft, Google... All of them were once the underdog who got a good product and leapfrogged the competition. The problem is what they did after to keep this position.

There is no way to get out of this cycle unless we start championing open source solutions, even if technically inferior at first.

You will be the only one at first.

What do you achieve compared to using a throwaway account?

If you use a thrrowaway, Discord still keeps their dominant position and have no competition, so they will keep enshitifying.

If you use a bridge, more of their accounts will be just bridging bots, real users will be on the alternative networks and they will be forced to compete.

You don't need to self host, there are servers that do this for you

One person used Matrix and they sucked.

Judging people based on the messaging platform (or vice-versa) is one of the most shallow things there is nowadays. It's like girls who say they don't date anyone who uses Android.

Use Bridges. If you still need to interact with people on legacy platforms, use bridges.

Matrix make it super easy to interact with people on Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Set this up for yourself and you get to be the pioneer of the group who can lead them to a better way.

No one really depends on these corporate services. People are just too lazy and conformist to give up on the convenience that they bring.

In principle, I agree with you. But you are judging Reddit's value by the looking at the home page and taking a snapshot. Instead of looking at it as a lake of mostly crap, think of it as Instead of a river that filters things out and holds the not-crap that come from the flood.

If you don't mind me asking, how much are your current costs? My infra for managed hosting is way over-provisioned. If you are using your instance just for yourself, send me a DM and we can work out a deal.

caddy can serve the files and deal with SSL certificates in case you put this in a public domain.

I'm building on top of Funkwhale, so yes to both.

The instance itself is already up. To signup you need to become a member and $29/year gives you access to it, alongside with Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix.

What I am building now is a way that will unify this with a storefront which can let people sell their music and also a way to collect donations from their fans.

My low-tech and not photo-specific solution for this: I've created accounts for my parents on my matrix server, and we have a "family room" to share photos of the kids. The element client let's you browse all media upload to a room, so you sort of get the "chronological order" display.