2024 Self-Host User Survey Results

Damn, and I thought the gender ratio on Lemmy was bad.
- I do wonder how many within the man/woman responses are trans, too.
  Idk if that survey was mainly advertised on lemmy, but i know that at least one instance that did a survey had maybe 2% woman respondents, but more than two thirds of those were transfem.
  Either way, a little disconcerting. I'm not sure what to make of that or what (if anything) to do about it
  
  Who cares if they are trans? The more interesting question is what would make women generally more likely to self host? More free time? Different applications? Actually having a job in IT? Being single?
- Eh, the women I know in tech aren't particularly interested in self-hosting. Not sure why, but women seem to have a stronger separation between work and hobbies, whereas the men I work with often do personal projects at home related to their work. I think the women I work with would be more than capable, they just seem uninterested.
  
  I think we are still in an age where few women were encouraged to do technical things growing up, and found those subjects later in school, university or work. I suspect that will change over the next ten years.
  
  Possibly related to the whole mental load thing: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
  When you have two jobs you don't really want a third.
  
  Yeah, this is me. I refuse to get into work related hobbies, I just don't want to get burned out
- Wonder how the survey was sent out and whether that affected sampling.
  Regardless, with -3-4k responses, that’s disappointing, if not concerning.
  I only have a more personal sense for Lemmy. Do you have a source for Lemmy gender diversity?
  Anyway, what do you think are the underlying issues? And what would be some suggestions to the community to address them?
  
  It's hard to know overall for Lemmy, but I know that both Lemmy.ca and Lemmy.nz have surveyed their members.
  https://lemmy.ca/post/15125231 https://lemmy.nz/post/12001861
  Both were around 87% men, where as this selfhosting one is like 96% men.
  I would guess it's explained by society. Women are less likely to be in STEM which seems to almost be a prerequisite for Lemmy and possibly self-hosting, and of those women in STEM, and ( despite what you might think about your own house) there is still a societal expectation of them running the household and doing most of the household chores, even when they work full time. A third job, selfhosting, may be too much.
  
  The survey was originally sent out on reddit /r/selfhosted, so I expect most respondents are from there.

Shout out to my fellow "None Backup Strategies" chaos goblins.

I think this is pretty troubling. Including myself in the sentiment that the self-hosting community needs to do better. Aside from funding individual projects, are there any organizations that help fund self-hosting projects?
- How so? 40%-ish is actually pretty good!
  I'm also in the "no" bucket, but I've contributed bug reports and do intend to donate soonish now that I use more visible projects (used to just be minidlna, BTRFS, and openSUSE). I only added Jellyfin a few months ago, and I do intend to donate since I don't intend to report bugs or contribute code.
  
  True, it’s a good percentage, and probably better than most free software. That said, given the communities the self hosted apps support, their excitement for the products, and for some the essential nature of some of these apps, it would be nice to see the yes/no number more 50/50 at least.
- I’m in the no-bucket, but instead i spend time on issues, helping the community and sometimes code contributions to self hosted projects instead.
  This is not taken into the account of the question, however, but should be considered as contributing.
  (I also consider donating to be contributing.)
  
  Agreed. I’m not much of a coder, so the best contribution I can give is probably $$. At least until I get off my ass and learn something new!
- I wish there were more commercial services around Foss. (And I don't mean proprietary)
  They could do all sorts of things like sell swag and support.
- I also think that it is up to the developers to make it sustainable
  If they want funding they need to seek it. It has been shown that when a project has a one time donation popup they can raise a significant amount of money. They aso could sell products or services.
- Yeah, really don't get this one. As an example, I've been supporting the guy who writes most of the software I use via Github sponsors for a while, now. It's nice to get access to additional support chat rooms and perks and stuff, but just the feeling alone is satisfying enough.
  Feelsgoodman.jpg
  I genuinely recommend those with gainful employment to consider supporting the people who make the software and media you like (E.g. Patreon).
  Issue reports and the likes are nice, but they're really not a substitute for cash (in my opinion).
- 100% of my self-hosted projects are run exclusively by my recurrent donations.
  Good thing nobody's asking about what I've donated to the software projects I'm using to self-host.

"What is your gender?"
82 females, 3300 males...
Ah guys, where are the females?
- I'm a woman who does some self hosting. Hi.
  
  Btw also an awesome way of telling people you're pregnant.
- Must be our fault.

Really interesting to scroll through and see. Picked up a couple of new tools to look into, too, thanks!

How does one self-host Obsidian? Does that just mean file sync? What am I missing?
- https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1eo7knj/guide_obsidian_with_free_selfhosted_instant_sync/
  I just set this up yesterday, coincidentally. I have it behind a reverse proxy + subdomain so I and my wife can share notes easily wherever we are. Mainly shopping lists, projects, and other things.
  
  Oh that's brilliant, thanks
- The plug in "self hosted livesync" most likely. You need a couchdb server for it.

Sad... Did not see the survey when it was running...

Wat?
- I only need to send sign up and password reset emails for Jellyfin, I don't need to receive any emails back.
  
  I meant more like... which server part are you hosting. Answer: Client...
  
  https://github.com/axllent/mailpit
  
  Which service are you using for this?

no matrix instances!!??
- "What is your favorite self-hosted application?" had what looks to be about 15 matrix responses.
  Would potentially be interesting to see Matrix/XMPP/etc prevalence in future surveys, maybe replacing 'what activitypub apps' with a more generic 'what federated apps do you self-host'
  
  oh it did? i missed that scrolling through the results somehow, thanks!

I can't see any of the graphs. The show as a black box.
This despite disabling Canvas Blocker on the page for testing. According to my briwser, loading the resources from "cdn.jsdelivr.net" is blocked due to a CORS failure.
Aren there by any chance image dumps of the charts in any normal graphics image format? Or even jpeg-xl, for variety.

Archived

Greetings, i noticed Linux is the most popular OS by a majority amount. Which Linux OS is probably the most used and why is this? Is Linux prefered to host ZFS Samba shares rather than tailored OS's like Unraid, Trunas, OMV?

I am disappointed ...
- I don't want to accidentally cache some no-no content that gets me turbofucked by the law, sure I could probably defend if it ever came up but that's a stress i dont even want the possibility of having in my life
- I sort of get it. When you self host mastodon or lemmy, you have to deal with the moderation that comes with it. That's a headache unless you have a ton of free time. Judging by the age distribution, I'm guessing most of us just want things to work so we can do what we enjoy.
  
  @CosmicTurtle0 hosting a single user federated blog is also an option, you are only responsible for yourself and your friends you host. Not necessary to host public.
  
  You can run those as single-user instances or with approval of users so you can use those instances for your family and/or friends only.
- Lemmy uses activity pub right? 200 in a survey hosting similar stuff is not that bad IMO.
- It's alright! We don't all have to host our own instance. Existing ones can easily accommodate hundreds of users.
- Why? I'm not particularly interested in ActivityPub, I just use Lemmy because it's the closest thing to Reddit w/o being Reddit. Once a better alternative shows up, I'm out.
  I'm happy to throw some money at the admin of my instance, I'm not interested in hosting something myself, especially when things can break when different instances are on different versions.
- What are some interesting things to host?
  
  The usual suspects: Mastodon (or mastodon-compatible servers like GoToSocial), PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc.
- What the hell is an ActivityPub platform?
  
  ActivityPub is the protocol powering the Fediverse. Platforms include Lemmy, Mastodon and Pixelfed.