I know it is not the first time that I submit Communick to a "Show HN", but given the renewed interest for alternatives to the existing social media networks, I thought it would be ok to post about it again.
I've been running it as a side-project for over 3 years now. My reasoning was that if/when people started to pay attention to the tremendous damage caused by ad-driven social networks, they would be looking for alternatives where they wouldn't mind a small monthly/yearly amount. So I set up to build a provider of alternatives, which would all be based on open source technology and that was designed to interoperate with other servers as well.
Basically, the idea is not to become yet-another social network, but merely to provide a solution for those who want to be part of the Fediverse without having to deal with the headaches of dealing with hardware (provisioning a server), software (troubleshooting/upgrading service) or meatware (dealing with quirky/unprofessional instance admins or unresponsive moderation).
This, quite frankly, has not caught on. Network effects are very real and very few people would join my Mastodon instance when there are so many others who have been managing to be supported by donations (I still think that is not the most rational and fair model, but this is a discussion for another post [0]). No matter how cheap my offering is or even if I was creating group packages [1] to allow people to pay for their friends, it's hard to compete with "free".
I was getting a lot of requests from people who wanted to have their own instance, so this is what I start to set up. I started last month to offer Mastodon managed hosting. In this case, the customers are fully responsible for their users and the content, and Communick is only responsible for making sure the infrastructure is in place.
This weekend I was planning to make the final adjustments to add Pixelfed hosting, but with the events related to Reddit, I ended up taking the opportunity to make some experiments with Lemmy [2], launched a "test instance" [3] and got it to play nicely with my cluster, so if anyone wants to run their own server, they can.
If anyone is worried about data protection: I'm running the servers in Germany, I have absolutely zero tracking or analytics in place, the Matrix server works with end-to-end encryption and the reason that I did not add any bridges to it is that so I can keep it "clean".
Any feedback is always welcome, and I have a 14-day trial for anyone that is on the fence. The Lemmy instance is open for registrations and will be free for everyone that signs up now until I can integrate with LDAP so that I can have SSO like the other services. Even if/when I close the registration for paid-only members, I will happily grandfather in any of you that sign up.
Thank you and hope to see you there!
[0]: https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/
[1]: https://communick.com/packages
[2]: https://join-lemmy.org
[3]: https://communick.news
