ByteOnBikes

Five years ago, a open-source project I worked on moved to Zulip (from Slack) and it was a small hurdle. But after a month, I really like it!

So much that I’ve pushed a few other open source projects (who lived on Discord).

I was really surprised when I started a new job two years ago and THEY used a self-hosted Zulip. It’s everything Im used to on Slack.

Discord has team speak/video sharing, which I don’t think Zulip has. But then again, we use something else for video calls.

For e2ee, neither does Discord, nor Stoat, which is what most of these comments are pushing people towards.

What was the problem with Zulip on mobile did you have?

I only use it for text chat, so I’m curious.

It does lead to slippery slopes. First, it’s to block “adult content”.

Then, they’ll consider certain topics “adult”. News about current events? LGBT content? Video games with some violence in it?

Facebook is an example of this slippery slope. And for parts of the country, they do need to scan an ID.

Ooof, yeah reading their comments, I agree.

OP, if you’re reading this, start even smaller. Not everything has to be right in your house.

I been deploying web apps since 2010, and I jumped right into self hosting during the pandemic and it was a massive headache or challenges I wasn’t prepared to face or maintain.

I gave up (for now) and just used open-source apps and AWS, because I needed availability. And every few months, I do a bit more to one day move everything to pure self hosting.

This was my mistake when I started self hosting a few years ago!

I went all-in on FOSS. And my God, it was constantly a maintenance nightmare for some apps. Some would break with updates. Some times I felt I was playing wackamole replacing one set of problems with new ones.

Then I met a swlf-hoster who has been doing self hosting for two decades and he helped he unfuck my stuff by recommending commercial and paid services. And honestly, it was awesome because I’m too old for this shit. I just want working services.

This is actually really helpful for me. Thank you.

My recommendation ist to look wath you need in terms of availabillity and redundance. For my personal use it’s fine if the Nextcloud is down for a few days, but for a Business that can be fatal.

When my home stuff doesn’t get eleven 9’s of reliability, I get frustrated and shut it down. But you’ve given me perspective. I feel like I’ve been pretty hard on myself because I’m comparing my personal setups to businesses/orgs.