FYI: it looks like Trump is going to win the popular vote on this one as well.

Open source or GTFO. :)

Seriously, Lemmy is AGPL. Any client you do and any functionality you build on top of it must be AGPL as well.

Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork? If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?

As a concept, it could be a valid approach. But you need to put actual numbers to see if things make sense:

• What would be the monthly membership fee?
• What would be a reasonable SLA? If there is an outage on a Friday night, are the members okay if they wait until Monday to get it back someone online?
• What do you think is a good hour rate to pay for an admin?
• What should you pay for someone to stay on call?
• Can I run bots? How many? Does each bot count as a separate account?

I think you’ll see that as soon as you start asking people to put money and to feel like they “own” it, the demands will increase and so will the costs.

For reference, the one coop I am somewhat familiar is from Mastodon: cosocial.ca. Each member pays CA$50/year for an account. I think this is particularly too expensive. There are other cheaper “commercial” alternatives that charge less:

• omg.lol offers mastodon and some other services, for $20/year
• mastodon.green offers accounts at $2/month
• Communick offers Mastodon/Lemmy/Funkwhale/Matrix accounts for $29/year (Disclosure, I’m founder)

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several million Euros of venture-capital to fund a marketing campaign.

Citation needed. Matrix was funded by Amdocs initially, then got investment from Automattic and has gotten some contracts from European Governments, but AFAIK there is no “VC investment” and there certainly aren’t “millions to fund marketing”.

They do have better marketing than any XMPP developer, though. You basically don’t hear anything from process.one or the Prosody devs.

has many more options for clients,

The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying “this is my XMPP handle” was far from enough to know if you’d be able to communicate with others, and you’d have to figure out things like:

• Does the server support MUC?
• Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
• Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
• Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
• If my client supports “share live location”, what do you see on your end?

Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

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.

Not to diss an open source project, but Faircamp is “just” a static site generator for artists that want to showcase their music. It has no storefront, can no communicate with customers, etc. People need a lot more than a nice-looking playlist .

If you are considering an alternative for Bandcamp, may I contact you? I am working on something that I hope can both be useful for artists looking for a mor stable income stream and music listeners who want an alternative to Spotify.

Shit, you are right. I forgot they went down this source-available hill.

n8n.io works pretty great for individuals and small teams, open source and self-hostable.

If you are looking for a system just for you and low on resources, I’d recommend https://gotosocial.org. Single binary, easy to setup and supports S3 storage.

Thunderbird is good enough for me I guess. I don’t think it is slow, it handles my multiple accounts just fine. I don’t have an overly complex email tbh, so my biggest requirements are only (a) how fast can I archive things (b) how easy it is to find things by searching. I also used evolution for a while, but thought it was doing more than I needed so I never cared about digging in deeper.

Obviously I’d need a webmail client

Why “obviously”? Plenty of open source, high quality email clients for desktop and mobile, and I can not think of any scenario nowadays where you’d be willing to access your email from an untrusted device anyway.

Running a VPS does not disqualify as self-hosted, but I do agree that this type of question is not really on-topic.

@Mateleo@lemmy.dbzer0.com, you’ll be better off by asking on some other community on programming.dev or !pro@selfhosted.forum

They could solve your last point by providing a community forum like Discourse or even Lemmy, and saying that support for the packaged software is an extra charge.

It’s still baffling for me that none of their “budget-cloud” (Hetzner, OVH) providers have not gotten into this segment of taking open source packages and offer as a turn-key system.

Can you DM a bit more details? Depending on their size and budget, I can help. I can host their own Mastodon/Matrix server for less than $30/month and provide the tech support to the transition.

What type of organization is it? Could they be convinced to provide an alternative in the fediverse?