Weird webdev struggles
I've been on a roll recently, organizing all my webdev-stuff I want to host, where I want it, and how I want to do it. Still, there's some odd struggles I've had during this process that maybe someone will find relatable.
My main problem is always picking a domain. From what site? What name is best? Will the thing I want be considered 'premium', jacking its price to insane amounts? It made me realize how much I prefer the simple i2p way of doing things -- you just call yourself an identifieable name, and you're good to go. There's some beauty in that simplicity.
Okay, domains picked. Hard process, but we've done it. Now, what skeletons to use? Let's say, I want a fedi insance. There's not much about the more niche fedi instances; I had to dig to find Bookwyrm and Flohmarkt! Both of these are super cool, but at the same time, what's the interest in them?.. would anyone even sign up for a project like mine?.. Another thing I struggled with was a static generator. 11ty seemed cool, but setting things up for a multilang blog seemed like such a total hassle, I crawled back to Hugo. A lot of folk apparently dislike it, due to its 'bloat', for example, but turns out that their bloat is precisely what I need to run a complicated site with minimal issues. Additionally, it's so well-documented, that it's hard to really use anything else. Astro seemed like a completely different direction from what I needed, so that's a no-go. More 'lo-spec' options also don't quite fit me. While I wish the web was simpler, I also have a wife that reminds me that there's a lot of 'lo-spec' or 'old-web-inspired' sites that cross the eyestrain barrier into almost lowkey seizure-like symptoms, and long walls of text are horrid for a dyslexic. Man, you really have to think about a lot of things while making a site.
I finally settled on a few things, here and there. I want to run a booru, and, honestly, e621 is somehow looking like a perfect candidate. For fedi, I picked a wide array of mixed things. Snac for my usual postings, Misskey stays as a comfy, introductory space to the fedi, Wafrn for talking about art, Akkoma for folks who want a more loose, shitposty, but still comfy personal space. For photos I ended up with Immich -- this might seem counter-productive, as I also will run Nextcloud, but it's mostly for my mom. She has some tech trouble with those types of things, so I want to make her transition a tad easier. For a wiki, mediawiki is the most obvious winner. Public file hosting -- mediagoblin. Since my mission is with a heavy art focus, there's also Drawpile and Poti Kaini. Probably will set up an imageboard for more general, non-artistic use anyway. For chatting there's Stoat, IRC, and Mumble... Nerimity seems fun, but it having such bad docs and not supporting self-host is pretty shitty in my eyes. Meaning 'I'd have to fork this', meaning, 'I need to learn TypeScript to really fork this'. Sigh. For some utility, I'll also run a private Calibre-web, Paperless, Forgejo.
It's a pretty long list, and it took me ages to settle on everything. It's genuinely really tough to find nice, well-documented things to self-host. The best example I mentioned is Nerimity -- sure, it's open source, but you will not even get help from the devs to do anything with it ('it's not meant to be self-hosted' my ass). That sucks! You should be happy folks want to run your stuff. I don't really get the hostilities, but that's besides the point.
In the end, I just wish more projects like Zola or Nerimity -- or even my beloved Yacy -- had better docs. I know a part of it is contributing to those projects, but the list of stuff I'd have to contribute to is only getting longer, not shorter. It just sucks that it seems that devs don't really think about a normal, house user, wanting to try their stuff. I can manage doing things with little to no docs, but that's because I'm obsessed with these things. To a casual user, this is a barrier they can't really easily cross, even if they really want to. I don't know. It feels like a problem without a solution in sight, not due to a lack of a good solution, but just a lack of willingness, time, or energy to document things.
I don't think I have a proper solution for this, no. But I'll definitely work more to be able to contribute to projects with little documentation, so that others can use more awesome things. That's the main goal -- to make the web more accessible to everyone -- isn't it?