• 12 Posts
  • 62 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2025

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  • early_riser@lemmy.worldOPtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldAbandoned FOSS projects
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    1 month ago

    I’m not saying proprietary software doesn’t also have problems, just that FOSS has problems unique to it that are rarely acknowledged.

    Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval. But I’m also practically the only one interacting with those systems, so I’m the only one who’s affected if something breaks.




  • Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.

    I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.





  • I wrote a post a while ago comparing various wiki and wiki-adjacent offerings. I’ve settled on DokuWiki as it’s easy to host. The UI is dated (though I don’t think it’s outright ugly). The vanilla experience is a bit bare-bones but there’s a built-in GUI for searching and installing plugins. The only pain point I can foresee is upgrading and long-term management thanks to juggling so many plugins. If the newest version of the base software doesn’t play nice with a particular plugin, or if a plugin stops being developed, etc.



  • Judging by how productive I’ve been just in the last 8 hours, I’d say going from Mediawiki to Dokuwiki was a good choice. I’m not even sure why. DW still uses markup instead of a WYSIWYG editor, which I’m fine with. I think it’s the namespaces. MW does have them, but you have to set them up with a config file on the server, and adding and removing them cannot be done lightly. With DW it’s as easy as searching for new_namespace:some_new_article, and the namespace is created along with the article. So I have a scratchpad namespace where I can work on drafts, a stories namespace to put my attempts at creative writing, a lore namespace for, well, canonized lore tidbits, and so on. And I don’t need to worry about names colliding like I did with MW where lore articles and story titles often conflicted.

    DW lets you use hierarchy when it works, and loose categories (tags) when it doesn’t (with the tags plugin that is). With MW you just have categories but no hierarchy. Bookstack is the opposite. It forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. It does have tags, too, but you can’t have pages outside of books, and the pages have an explicit order. You can fairly easily change that order, but it’s always there.

    Back to DokuWiki, the blog plugin has proven invaluable over the last few days. I can jot down ideas as blog entries and push them to the main lore namespace if I think they’re worth keeping.