I’ve been selfhosting my video / photo / book collections for a while now and also running other services like personal bugeting, piehole DNS, and stuff like that.
Lately I’ve been working on the hardware side of my home network. I’m looking for some advice and normally I’d turn to one of the homelab communities. But the three communities I found hadn’t had much or any activity in the past 6 months.
I considered asking a question here related to my switch and my wifi access point. I bet there are lots of clever folks in this community. But before hitting submit I remembered to check the community rules in the side bar and noticed rule #3:
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing.
Where do all the lovely self-hosters here turn when they want to chat networking or server hardware? Anyone have some recommendations for neighbouring communities they find useful?
I know this might seem like a strange answer, but… IRC channels on private torrent trackers. Many of the people on these sites actively have large and complex setups running. There often is a lot of talk about hardware for servers and networking in those IRC channels. Or at least there is on the trackers I am on.
I know that’s not necessarily a helpful answer to anyone not already in the private torrent tracker community, since its often quite a task to get involved if you aren’t already. However, it’s one that I have had great success with, personally. To anyone who already is on a private torrent tracker, if you haven’t checked out the IRC, give it a shot and see.
Oh and don’t forget you can self-host The Lounge for a self-hosted web-based IRC client.
I kind of miss the message board era of the internet. Those niche communities could be really useful.
I’m still using public trackers. Maybe after I get my network setup I’ll invest some time into finding a good private tracker or two to join.
Private trackers are like the Matrix’s “zion”. When civilization collapses into a dystopian surveillance capitalism hellscape and the AIs and fascist governments take over the net, the last free humans will be hiding in private tracker communities, sharing freely and building a resistance. Will we have mechs with gatling guns? I don’t know, all I can say is I hope so because it looks like we’re going to need it.
You’re using public trackers, so you’re probably not in the habit of being a seeder. With private trackers, you HAVE to seed. Deleting a torrent from your client once it’s finished is most certainly a habit you will have to break once you finally do get into some private trackers.