this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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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?

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 48 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in !selfhosted@lemmy.world when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don't think that it'd be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.

However.

End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn't the case for me for this at all or (b) there's too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don't want thrown at them. I think that there's enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what's covered that it's probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren't interested in or where their knowledge isn't relevant.

Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like !games@lemmy.world still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like !shmups@lemmus.org.

I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. As things stand, I tend to say "I'd like to have more traffic in the communities I'm in" than "there's too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down".

[–] myfavouritename@lemmy.world 8 points 15 hours ago

I agree with you there. It seems like communities need a certain mass to feel right and above or below that it's time to split or consolidate.

I can imagine the mods making a rule like #3 to help avoid taking traffic from the hardware-specific communities.