TL;DR: Please search and subscribe to !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org on your instance to cache it on your instance so we can get visibility. We're moving to our own hosting. Thanks for everything Ruud!
I'm excited to announce some big changes for our Vegan Home Cooks. As many of you know, Lemmy has been our platform of choice and we are hosted on the largest Lemmy instance lemmy.world. However, it's time for us to evolve and move to our own instance. Let me explain why.
Lemmy.world, while a significant player in the Lemmy universe, has diverged in its vision and management from what we seek in a platform. The admins there have different political and operational views that don't align with our goals. This is no slight against them; it's just a matter of different paths.
It's important to recognize that Lemmy is, at its heart, a passion project. Developed by talented individuals driven by their ideals rather than corporate goals, it operates on a scale that's more hobbyist than mass-market. This has its charms, but it also means that development isn't as rapid as one might expect in a more commercial environment.
The thing is, this approach works for many in the Lemmy community. The developers, supported by donations, have been content with this pace and scale. Even major instances have been okay with this grassroots, community-oriented approach. For a platform born out of a communal ethos rather than a corporate one, this isn't surprising.
However, things started shifting when Reddit made some API changes. Suddenly, Lemmy was thrust into the spotlight as a potential drop-in replacement for Reddit. This influx of users, many with expectations shaped by the slick efficiency of corporate tech, put an unprecedented strain on the platform and its developers. Imagine, a small, community-funded team suddenly dealing with the demands of 50,000 new users. It was a clash of cultures and expectations.
Lemmy.world stepped up during this influx. Run by volunteers, they took a more corporate approach to manage the surge. Their rapid growth brought them under the spotlight, attracting both hackers who exposed major flaws and users who demanded rapid scaling and development.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. There's a growing rift between the Lemmy developers and the team at lemmy.world. The developers, whose political views differ significantly from many in the Western tech sphere, run lemmy.ml with a distinct set of principles. The arrival of a large number of new users, many with different viewpoints, led to tensions and even bans.
This situation has led to a split within the community. A group of developers, frustrated with the direction and pace of Lemmy, are creating Sublinks – a Lemmy-compatible platform. Their plan? To eventually replace Lemmy, particularly on large instances like lemmy.world, effectively outmoding the original platform.
So, where does this leave us? We've been observing these developments and have concluded that the best way forward for our community is to establish our own Lemmy instance. This move will allow us to build a space that aligns with our values and needs, free from the external pressures and conflicts affecting the larger Lemmy ecosystem.
This is a big step, but it's one that opens up exciting opportunities. We'll have more control over our platform's direction and be able to create an environment that truly reflects our community's spirit and needs. Please search and subscribe to !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org on your instance to cache it on your instance so we can get visibility. We're moving to our own hosting. Thanks for everything @ruud@lemmy.world, you and your team have been a gracious host.
100% behind this decision. What plans do you have for the instance in terms of communities?
I still miss the r/shittyveganfoodporn subreddit. Maybe we'll have to establish one there.
I don't like calling anything porn personally but this is a pet peeve, maybe just shittyveganfoodpics
Fair enough. Or even just ShittyVeganFood.
Not sure if you're familiar with the subreddit, but there was definitely a little bit of overlap between it and VHC. (No offence intended ;) It was mostly extra-low effort meals sometimes falling into meme territory. It was kinda the diametric opposite of VeganFoodPorn, with VHC somewhere in the between the two. Basically anything people were too embarrassed or insecure about to post here. Or if they wanted to meme about eating a block of tofu straight with a splash of sriracha.
To be honest I do find it kind of offensive calling peoples food shitty (not taking offense from you dw. just explaining my thought process). This community is just to showcase what real vegans eat and to celebrate it and show non-vegans and struggling vegans what real food looks like and that it doesn't have to be "gourmet" and take a long time. It really isn't shitty and I am frankly tired of the reddit tier bullshit. Bigger picture is also carnists have no idea what we even eat or what real food is.
The biggest problem with veganism is recidivism so this is really a showcase for a discord server of friends with a ephemeral community to ask questions with and share something we have to do every day. It isn't about "porn" or visual fluff to look at and no one should be insecure about posting anything here as I think. Further, I'm of the opinion that instagram and instagramability is toxic to peoples mind and on the other hand the really beautiful food-blogger tier photos are designed to sell you something not teach.
Again, I know where you are coming from and I appreciate you taking the time to comment and participate. I know when I write out thoughts people get super duper mad and think that I am mad (I'm not I'm bored at work lol) but this is something I thought a lot about and even wrote about in the sidebar here.
I'm not against setting up a vegan food meme community in the big picture but calling things porn makes me want to vomit lol. I hate reddit.
Oh, I totally get where you're coming from. VFP ended up being mostly influencers trying to drive traffic to their website, as did most of the non-adult-themed "Porn" subreddits. And honestly their names were kinda apt, as they did often have a somewhat exploitative vibe.
SVFP, on the other hand, was pretty tongue in cheek, and very much the opposite of that. A lot of it was depressed people sharing their self described "shitty" struggle meals, certainly not ragging on other people's food. (Although I suppose there were the occasional "I was at a conference and the vegan option was a piece of toast" type posts.)
I'm personally a bit of a perfectionist at times, and having a place that specifically celebrated mediocrity was very cozy and encouraging when I'd worry that my food is too boring or not good enough. If I feel my food is shitty, regardless if I should or not, it's nice to have a home for it.
In any case, I understand why the name might raise some eyebrows, so I'd be more than happy to drop that.
I'm not seeing all the comments yet on the new community, just the posts, federation is weird!
My understanding of the architecture is that we should keep it simple and basically have a 1:1 relationship for instance to communities so that each instance would host a community then there would be larger "identity" instances with user accounts that would access all the federated communities. This would build a lot of resilience into the network so that if any community instance goes down, its cached on the identity instances and not require them to be online all the time and the hardening would need to be on the identity instances. This is I think never going to happen, so I probably will host a few more communities on my new site