Lemme tell ya somethin about Tiddlywiki. Actually a lot of knowledge base software has this problem (I’ve specifically encountered it in Trillium, Obsidian, and TW).

You have your body where you’re austencibly storing the meat of your information. But you also have configurable metadata fields. Obsidian has its YAML headers, and TW and Trillium have separate metadata forms. All three of these have scads of methods for sorting and querying and filtering the metadata but next to nothing for the actual note. But the note is already organized data. It has headings and subheadings and text under those headings. Why can’t that be queried? I got into this on the TW forums. Everyone was basically telling me to cram all of the actual data into the header, leaving the note itself virtually empty. Obsidian has its bases feature which does the same thing. Then why not just have a bunch of YAML files? A genuine question, I’d actually love a system for sorting and querying a bunch of organized YAML files almost like a noSQL database. But Obsidian doesn’t let you do that. It has to be markdown.

I got off track there, but there it is.

Was it the backend, maintaining the DB and juggling extensions and such, or was it organizing the wiki itself? I’ve heard lots of people complain about maintenance. My personal project currently uses Mediawiki with sqlite as the DB. I’m essentially the only editor and almost the only reader, so it’s more of a CMS than anything.

Because the wiki is public, I have to maintain a separate KB (currently Obsidian) for drafts and scratch notes and other “thinking out loud” such and such that I’m not ready to present to the public. That’s why I’m looking at something with access control. I’d like to consolidate all my work on this project to a single place, with notes and drafts accessible only to me, that I can publish when I’m satisfied. Dokuwiki with a crapload of plugins seems to be the closest.

logseq

Forgot about logseq. It’s an outliner first and foremost, so not what I’m looking for.

silverbullet

This one’s almost there. No version history. For accessibility reasons I’d like something that clearly separates the acts of writing/editing and reading/consuming. It works better with screen readers. In silverbullet, headings only look like headings, but they’re just undifferentiated text to a screen reader. Obsidian has the same problem). I get why people want a seamless editing experience, but it’s very important to me to keep track of how my ideas change over time, and Obsidian and Silverbullet are constantly saving your edits, making versioning difficult.

Helix notes (mentioned recently in another post) tries to get past this by having a “save new version” button.

QOwnNotes

Very very simple. I can see why some would be attracted to it but I’m not.

Never heard of vBulletin. I’m on a couple old phpBB conlanging forums that are still hanging around. My main gripe is the use of antiquated BB Code for formatting and a lack of a user mention feature.

As for modern forums, I like nodeBB.

I think you could take this arbitrarily far. Why buy a motherboard when building a computer when you should design the PCB yourself? Why go with a pre-existing processor? You should design the architecture from scratch. Why aren’t you mining your own silicon and growing your own ingots? You’re not a real nerd unless you have your own chip fab.

Some people get into self hosting because they want their data to be their data. They don’t care about the particulars, they just want that peace of mind. Others get into it because they’re already in a tech or tech-adjacent field and want to improve their skills. Some, such as myself, fall somewhere in the middle. I work in IT and am sometimes in the mood to tinker, but sometimes I just want it to work without much fuss.

hmmmm seems to deploy fine but when I try to register a new account (per the setup instructions) I just get an unknown error.

The concept is promising, as I said before I’ve been wishing for an integrated forum/wiki for a while now, but it seems like it’s very early days for this project.

The AI stuff has me bristling though. Not a fan.

Will have to look into this. Been saying for a while that a wiki-forum combo would make sense, since a forum slowly becomes a repository of knowledge, if not generally then at least for its members, and a less linear and more browsable way to catalog that knowledge would make sense. You can set up a separate wiki server but then you have two things to manage and moderate.

Oh hey I’ve been looking for “obsidian but with version history “ for a bit now.

Or we could finally rip off the bandaid and move to IPv6

iPhone has better accessibility.

I’m sure it is but I have an iphone

It’s already hard enough for self-hosters and small online communities to deal with spam from fleshbags, now we’re being swarmed by clankers. I have a little Mediawiki to document my deranged maladaptive daydreams worldbuilding and conlanging projects, and the only traffic besides me is likely AI crawlers.

I hate this so much. It’s not enough that huge centralized platforms have the network effect on their side, they have to drown our quiet little corners of the web under a whelming flood of soulless automata.

I meant the OP more as a lament about it being hard rather than a quip about it being easy.

Though upon reflection it’s not the voice chat that’s a problem, it’s the fact that Discord is a lot of things, a chatroom, a VOIP service, and so on, and recreating all those things on top bolting on federation (which I don’t see as a desirable feature in this case) is what makes it so hard.

Update: I got Mumble working without a lot of grief. Their mobile client isn’t great though. I might try Stoat.

Federation just complicates things, as it’s just for a myself and a few friends.

I haven’t messed with Ansible in a bit. Do you mean playbook? Or is cookbook some other concept I haven’t learned about yet?

Good bot

Nowadays everyone accepted the name “Discord” but I think it’s a pretty poor choice of branding too.

A terrible name for an app meant to facilitate communication. Always baffled me. But the name is so widely recognized that nobody thinks twice about it.

I always thought Noosphere would make a cool name for a Discord replacement, especially if it incorporates a way to permanently catalog the knowledge accrued by the community, say as a built-in wiki. That might actually make it viable as a support platform.

Why federate if you’re just expecting a small group of friends to use it?

So no mini PC then? I’d have to build a tower I suppose.

Don’t own one yet. But I guess USB?