Feedly is the closest thing to Google Reader that I’ve found.

I only have com/net/org domains, so I never noticed that. But you’ve provided good information. There is a list of CloudFlare supported TLD’s here https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/

I have most of my domains on Google, but also have a couple on CloudFlare. I suppose I will just move them all to CloudFlare. They offer free WHOIS privacy and several other features for free. For those of you self hosting on a dynamic IP, there’s a pretty good API that you can use for DNS updates.

Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.

If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.

Of the themed instances that exist now, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren’t strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.

For example, I’m sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the lemmy@lemmy.ml community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.

I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There’s nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn’t force those subs on anyone else on the instance.

And if you don’t want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.

That’s not how Lemmy works. You just need an account on ONE instance. And then subscribe to all the communities that interest you, some may be local to your instance and some may be hosted on other instances.

Honestly, I hope not.

For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that’s what should happen.

I was never insinuating that an instance owner should limit their scope. But just because you run an instance doesn’t mean you have to be the home node for the communities you are interested in. It goes against the idea of federation. If a community already exists on another instance, as an instance owner you should subscribe to that community rather than making your own. That increases resilience.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to create a new community. I’m saying that due diligence should be taken BEFORE creating a new community, to be sure that community doesn’t already exist.

Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I’d prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There’s a reason why every community shouldn’t be on a single instance. It’s a single point of failure.

If you are familiar with Docker, you can easily run it in your existing VPS. It doesn’t use a lot of resources.

If you are not familiar with Docker, you should look in to it.

https://docker-curriculum.com/

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-beginners-guide-to-docker-how-to-create-your-first-docker-application-cc03de9b639f/

I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.

The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.

I’m assuming you’re using docker.

Make sure you have websockets support turned on.

You might also try to add custom locations under NPM. I made those changes at the same time I made some changes to the “advanced” tab of NPM. I’m not sure which thing fixed it, or maybe it required both. Try this, and if it still doesn’t work, then add the advanced tab settings farther down this reply.

You will need custom locations in your NPM proxy host settings for Lemmy for the following paths.

/api

/feeds

/pictrs

/nodeinfo

They should point to the container that is running the lemmy application, not the UI one, just the lemmy one and to port 8536. If your NPM is not on the same docker network as lemmy, you will need to expose port 8536 on the lemmy container and add it to the lemmyexternalproxy network.

If those changes don’t bring you joy, try also adding the following lines to the “advanced” tab of your NPM proxy host settings for Lemmy.

proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $remote_addr;

real_ip_header X-Real-IP;

real_ip_recursive on;

If anything I have said is confusing to you, please reach out via DM and I’ll try to help.

I really like SearXNG for searching. It combines results from multiple search engines (that you define) and strips out advertisements. You can host your own SearXNG instance if you are in to self hosting, or you can use one of the many available public instances.

I was explaining it to a friend today, and I came to the conclusion that Lemmy is a LOT like the old FIDOnet message network that was used on BBS’s.