Homepage is great. I like that you get little snippets from the apps it links through but is more customisable than something like Heimdall which does similar. It’s become my go-to having tried pretty much every other dashboard out there over the years.

It’s really hard. And really expensive. I used to work in five nine environments, life or death type use cases, and my rule of thumb was that you double your cost for every extra nine you add.

When we got to five nines it was multiple hot standbys with a custom control and orchestration plane - literally custom hardware we had to build. This was for local installations, so not modern cloud environments (it was over a decade ago), but many of the challenges are similar, like session handling, transmission replay and caching, locking, clashing, routing, jitter, latency etc.

I moved from Organizr to Homepage via Heimdall.

I had no end of issues with Organizr. It felt like something broke with each update and performance was pretty bad (not to mention some apps just not working with it). Seemed to be pretty common when I last tried it a couple of years ago, there were lots of similar complaints.

The good thing about Homepage is that the widgets mean you rarely have to go in to each app’s ui, so it actually saves me time.

Don’t do any port forwarding, and test your network’s external exposure regularly. If you do that, you’ll set yourself up in the right way.

If you need to access anything you’re self-hosting from outside your network, do it through a VPN and open up one single port, the one the VPN users, rather than accessing services directly. And use a non-standard VPN.

This has other benefits too. For example, if you’re running a pihole, you’ll be able to use it when out and about on your phone if you’re going through your own VPN.

I’ve been on reddit a long time, over 17 years, and I’m a member of some private subs that happen to have some quite influential users in them. It would be really interesting to open those up to the public to see what reddit influencers are saying in closed spaces, and the amount of gaming etc. that goes on between prominent users you see all across the site.

Admittedly, at least the subs I’m in are relatively quiet these days, but in years gone by they’d basically decide what was going to be popular, who was going to mod which subs etc.

This is almost certainly true. But what I can’t figure out is that Reddit needs Mods for the subs. And surely mods, and potential mods, are more engaged and informed.

There’s always been this implicit understanding that Reddit gets free moderation across the whole site, something other SM sites spend millions if not billions on each year, in exchange for those mods having autonomy, control, and a sense of ownership of the subs they mod. That social contract has completely broken down.

I’d guess mods get into modding for one of two reasons. One is power/influence, which is now seriously diminished, and the other is because they care about the community, and they must now be wondering whether Reddit Inc is the best place to host such a community when it appears to be so hostile to users.

If the AMA taught us anything, it’s that spez doesn’t actually use reddit. Let alone understand it.

Alternatively, Elon just found out how many people are blocking him.

The best on-boarding experience I’ve ever had was with a remote company. I think it’s more that companies still haven’t adapted properly to remote working, or have paid lip service to it. If a company does it well, it can be excellent, I’d argue better than in-person because it’s more inclusive.

What I struggle with a bit is that making apps accessible on iOS is pretty straight forward. You almost have to go out of your way to not do it. I don’t have experience in Android development, but would imagine it’s at least similar? So I can only conclude that it’s something reddit really doesn’t care about. Not even an after-thought. So I’m sceptical of any company with that sort of mindset being able to do a good job.

Agreed on RedReader. I wouldn’t be putting any time, effort, or money in to developing a reddit app or bot right now. The writing’s on the wall.

Probably depends on how you define success with these things. The valuation of the company is down a significant amount since it was purchased and recent reports had ad revenue also down a significant amount too. Whether the owner cares about those things is probably up for debate, and evidence would suggest he might be looking for something other than money out of it, like influence, or just a play thing. I’m not sure the owners of Reddit are motivated by the same things, I think they just want to be richer. Time will tell I guess, it’s difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and intentional acts from the outside.

Absolutely wild that they looked at what happened at Twitter, identified all the things that triggered the several periods of mass migration to Mastodon (shutting off api access, policy changes, shutting down conversation about alternatives) and decided to speed run it. Next thing is trying to directly monetise people by giving them a red tick or something.

Not sure how I’d value mine, I can’t see any comparable ones. But then again my main is over 16 years old so has lots of karma, awards, membership to invite only subs with high profile users, mod permissions etc.

I suspect it’s diminishing returns once you get past a certain account age and karma count if it’s being used to spam or scam. Tempted to sell up and just draw a line under it though, it would feel dirty contributing to reddit after the way they’ve treated the people who actually generate value for them.

I feel like that’s gone a bit under reported. Reddit is basically saying that their current apps aren’t usable for users who need accessibility features, so they’re relaxing rules for apps that have better accessibility features, but those apps can’t be “commercial”.

So basically they don’t want to improve their own apps, and they don’t want to allow people who build apps with good accessibility to make any money, which means the only conclusion is that they put literally zero value on users who require those apps. Or, alternatively, they put zero value on developers of those apps, which makes their decision to charge other developers tens of millions of dollars to use the API almost inconceivably hypocritcal.