4 ms·

This seems like 15 minutes of work to me, but I get it. My hope is that, long run, we all collectively get better at building systems that help us with this st

This seems like 15 minutes of work to me, but I get it. My hope is that, long run, we all collectively get better at building systems that help us with this stuff. There should be off-the-shelf recipes that combine all these ingredients for us. There's already a very very strong self hosted community, mostly built around Kubernetes. They have a huge archive of Helm charts and other assemblages of easy to use off the shelf pre-assembled setups for stuff like this! There's also works like Yunohost, which offers a more bespoke set of automations and abstractions to make installing and running stuff easy. Sure, as a consumer, I get it: everyone just wants a dumb embedded sqlite and something easy to run. But it feels reductionist to demand that every author conform to the lowest common denominator. Tyranny of the lowliest user can not go in forever. And I for one am delighted to see how much better we have gotten at being able to helm-ify or whatever other packaging you please these concerns so someone can deliver an easy to use experience, composing the many parts. I think, I hope, I pray that is how we escape the lowest user trap.

greggsy 3y ago
> everyone just wants … something easy to run This is a valid need that any project maintainer should aspire to address. The ‘lowest common denominator’ is absolutely acceptable in an era of cheap storage and memory available to the average self hoster. Even a Pi4 or 5 will handle clunky containers.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Fuck this. Fuck this a lot. What a rubbish mind of moral absolutism, that is just never going to make everyone happy. Everyone will have different definitions of easy. The person here clearly assembled very popular very well known within php tools that make everything simple, and took inordinate care to carefully document all the steps if you know anything about modern php. It's just pandering bullshit from gross people to insist on making it simple. It's never going to be simple enough. Everyone will complain forever, be sad and unhappy that the machine doesn't just work, that there's not a service already running that does it, that they have to lift any fingers. The bar for for simplicity is ever diminishing, will forever sink, and the outrage that it's not simple enough is infinite. We cannot prey forever upon those who do by those who won't. We just can't demand this endless hell from everyone with a good idea. They can't all be your simple trite subject of decision for not having made it simple. > The ‘lowest common denominator’ is absolutely acceptable in an era of cheap storage and memory available to the average self hoster. Even a Pi4 or 5 will handle clunky containers. The lowest common denominator I was talking about isn't hardware, it's shitty low class negative internet dweebs who won't lift a finger to try to run something trying to make some auters interesting weird awesome software take a dive because it doesn't run whatever their preferred "simple" is. People are the low denominator, sucking up the oxygen in the room with their pissy "not easy enough" negativity. This system scales probably way way better and to way lower targets because it runs MySQL, because it can be tuned better, because it's more perfoant, because it's not "simple" enough for some. You can probably host way more people on an RPi with this. The hardware requirements are simple as heck, it's the how fucking low and how frelling stupid an author has to make it to run it that sets this bozo-bit bar. This author clearly spent hella time carefully documenting & using best-of-breed tools automating setup. But the shitty riff raff keeps demanding it be simpler. These people will never contribute anyways, is my suspicion, but I agree with them still: as I said, it should be simpler! The bar should be lowered! But it shouldn't be on authors to help lower the bar (endlessly imo); we should intermediate and build better tools (like Yunohost & Helm) to take & package excellent cared for beautiful works like this & help deliver & make them operable to lower denominator people, for whom trying to run a MySQL database is just too much. This clearly has my goat, and psuedo-applogie-ish on that. Those who crow for simplicity usually (in my view) have a version of reality in their mind that lays blame and waste to others & cherishes some nonsense internal pleasantville where we can just do away with a reality that the people actually doing the work have to live in, and which exists for very real reasons. There's high-level infantalized engineering where everything is imperfect for not perfectly matching expectations of how simple we want it to be.
  - greggsy 3y ago
    I want to use someone’s novel software idea. I do not need to understand how it is built and how to maintain it. Getting irate about what the customer wants (‘use software easily’), then blaming them for not wanting to understand the brilliant techniques that a hallowed developer has used is simply arrogant.
jw_cook 3y ago
> But it feels reductionist to demand that every author conform to the lowest common denominator. Sibling comment: > This is a valid need that any project maintainer should aspire to address. I think either of these things can be true, depending on the goals and intended audience of the project. It's totally valid for someone to make software like this primarily for themselves, and leave it up to others to tailor it to their own needs or contribute to make it more accessible. I get the impression this project was made for the author's particular use case and isn't (yet) seeking a broad audience. The readme for this project doesn't really explain this, though, which makes me realize several of my own projects don't clearly set these expectations either.

greggsy 3y ago

> everyone just wants … something easy to run This is a valid need that any project maintainer should aspire to address. The ‘lowest common denominator’ is absolutely acceptable in an era of cheap storage and memory available to the average self hoster. Even a Pi4 or 5 will handle clunky containers.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Fuck this. Fuck this a lot. What a rubbish mind of moral absolutism, that is just never going to make everyone happy. Everyone will have different definitions of easy. The person here clearly assembled very popular very well known within php tools that make everything simple, and took inordinate care to carefully document all the steps if you know anything about modern php. It's just pandering bullshit from gross people to insist on making it simple. It's never going to be simple enough. Everyone will complain forever, be sad and unhappy that the machine doesn't just work, that there's not a service already running that does it, that they have to lift any fingers. The bar for for simplicity is ever diminishing, will forever sink, and the outrage that it's not simple enough is infinite. We cannot prey forever upon those who do by those who won't. We just can't demand this endless hell from everyone with a good idea. They can't all be your simple trite subject of decision for not having made it simple. > The ‘lowest common denominator’ is absolutely acceptable in an era of cheap storage and memory available to the average self hoster. Even a Pi4 or 5 will handle clunky containers. The lowest common denominator I was talking about isn't hardware, it's shitty low class negative internet dweebs who won't lift a finger to try to run something trying to make some auters interesting weird awesome software take a dive because it doesn't run whatever their preferred "simple" is. People are the low denominator, sucking up the oxygen in the room with their pissy "not easy enough" negativity. This system scales probably way way better and to way lower targets because it runs MySQL, because it can be tuned better, because it's more perfoant, because it's not "simple" enough for some. You can probably host way more people on an RPi with this. The hardware requirements are simple as heck, it's the how fucking low and how frelling stupid an author has to make it to run it that sets this bozo-bit bar. This author clearly spent hella time carefully documenting & using best-of-breed tools automating setup. But the shitty riff raff keeps demanding it be simpler. These people will never contribute anyways, is my suspicion, but I agree with them still: as I said, it should be simpler! The bar should be lowered! But it shouldn't be on authors to help lower the bar (endlessly imo); we should intermediate and build better tools (like Yunohost & Helm) to take & package excellent cared for beautiful works like this & help deliver & make them operable to lower denominator people, for whom trying to run a MySQL database is just too much. This clearly has my goat, and psuedo-applogie-ish on that. Those who crow for simplicity usually (in my view) have a version of reality in their mind that lays blame and waste to others & cherishes some nonsense internal pleasantville where we can just do away with a reality that the people actually doing the work have to live in, and which exists for very real reasons. There's high-level infantalized engineering where everything is imperfect for not perfectly matching expectations of how simple we want it to be.
- greggsy 3y ago
  I want to use someone’s novel software idea. I do not need to understand how it is built and how to maintain it. Getting irate about what the customer wants (‘use software easily’), then blaming them for not wanting to understand the brilliant techniques that a hallowed developer has used is simply arrogant.

jw_cook 3y ago

> But it feels reductionist to demand that every author conform to the lowest common denominator. Sibling comment: > This is a valid need that any project maintainer should aspire to address. I think either of these things can be true, depending on the goals and intended audience of the project. It's totally valid for someone to make software like this primarily for themselves, and leave it up to others to tailor it to their own needs or contribute to make it more accessible. I get the impression this project was made for the author's particular use case and isn't (yet) seeking a broad audience. The readme for this project doesn't really explain this, though, which makes me realize several of my own projects don't clearly set these expectations either.