[Question] Self-hosting small snippets of text, like for Discord or similar?

More or less title.

The idea is, one can already excise the corporation social media somewhat, or limit their reach into your content, if you self-host your social media (or at least if you participate in the Fediverse, say on Mastodon Lemmy etc) and instead link or cross post to corporate ones such as say Twitter or Discord.

But I'm looking for something to self-host that is better geared to do this with small snippets of text that (mostly) stand by themselves. Something that would fit in a original!tweet or even smaller and would not have much use for the "conversation workflow" UI of corporate social media.

The two use cases I'm aiming for are:

  • instead of posting something creative directly on eg.: Reddit or Discord (by which in the latter it would get locked and lost in that blackhole), I just post it in $THINGY and then link it on Reddit / Discord. That way I also retain license.
  • having a "local" archive of my comments on various stuff that I can tag, query or consult on, or even easily share with other people.

At first I thought "maybe what I'm looking is micro-blogging" but on second thought it feels like I'm looking for something even smaller than that? I'm not at all sure, so I thought to ask around here what would you guys self-host for this kind of thing or if it's even a Thing.

Cheers.

supersquirrel , (edited )

Hmm, Dokuwiki is a reallllllly underrated wiki software that is extremely lightweight and doesn't require a database to run on (files are just stored in a folder). Multiple different wikis can be run on the same Dokuwiki server with plugins and in general it is a supremely easy way to host a body of text and images that can be easily edited by multiple people (or be kept private). The media manager for uploading images and managing them is really nice too.

Backing up your wiki on Dokuwiki is also absurdly easy because it is just a folder... that you can backup in any number of ways (git.. syncthing.. whatever).

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

Seriously, Dokuwiki needs more love.

veniasilente OP ,

Fun that you mention that, I happen to run my personal site, as well as another wiki for my Pokémon-related fanwork, and an internal kb wiki on my job, all on Dokuwiki. Used to advertise the engine more on Reddit back in the day, too. And sure it's quite lightweight and operable (I can edit articles remotely, manage remotely and do lots of cool stuff). Its just, from my experience so far, while it's extremely well-suited for the workflow of a wiki, it's not so much for the "post-it note" workflow, not even with additions like the Blog plugin.

Perhaps I have to yet tune it further. I guess it's time to Do Science.

supersquirrel ,

Oh super cool, yeah checking out your Dokuwiki personal website it just reminds me how much I like the software. The UI of pages is so simple and clean and Dokuwiki is so easy to setup I honestly don’t see the reason to really go with a normal website over using Dokuwiki unless you have very specific needs (especially because with the farm/animal plugin or whatever you can host multiple different wikis on the same website).

I don’t think Dokuwiki is perfect for what you want though but it is so lightweight and customizable that I originally mentioned it to suggest considering if you can tweak your workflow to make it work.

Have you looked at Logseq? It is a free and open source personal wiki/knowledge base with a great mobile app. The structure is every day has its own page that you add notes to, you then link to other pages to create them and move on to editing those pages like a normal wiki. Might be a little closer to what you are looking for.

https://logseq.com/

veniasilente OP ,

Yeah honestly sometimes Dokuwiki feels like it's the Konami cheat code for "simple good personal website". I'm like, why would anyone bother with stuff like, dunno, Wordpress, or Github Pages.

My hoster has been so nice to get me access to the docker on-site, so I'm gonna be testing stuff for a few days. I can't take a look at logseq until the weekend alas, due to work suddenly being work.

thejevans ,
@thejevans@lemmy.ml avatar

If you haven't found it yet, this site has a lot of great information you might want: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

veniasilente OP ,

That's a lot of info to work with, thanks! Seems there has been a lot of thought and deelopment about this and I just basically didn't know exactly what to search for.

Explicitly mention Twitter, Facebook, is an advancement. Let's see if they have some utility or strategy for Discord-style short snippets.

django ,

I think you should ask yourself, if you just want text, or if you'd like to have embedded images as well. In general it sounds, as if you are looking for something to publish notes. This could be simple text files on a webserver, or Markdown/Org-Mode files on a webserver, or Markdown/Org-Mode files converted to HTML on a webserver, or a tool like HedgeDoc: https://hedgedoc.org/

veniasilente OP ,

Wow you have given me good things to think about. At first I was thinking I'd want solely text, but now I'm thinking what I'd want would be something closer to hypertext / Rich Text since that's how the content shows in sites already. So something like a "HTML pastebin" or somesuch would work, I guess?

(HedgeDoc looks interesting, am going to look around for a demo)

django ,

There is a demo instance: https://demo.hedgedoc.org/

If you look at the buttons on the top, you'll see, that you can create a guest note.

veniasilente OP ,

So I'm running a Hedgedoc instance this week to test how things are going. Feels like one of the better choices.

lemmyreader ,

A paste bin is maybe what you want. Yunohost uses this software for their own https://github.com/toptal/haste-server
The about page of the Yunohost paste bin shows how it can look like : https://paste.yunohost.org/about.md

Other options possibly here : https://alternativeto.net/software/hastebin/?license=opensource

veniasilente OP ,

At the moment I'm testing Hedgedoc, I took a quickie look at haste-server but from what I read it got enshittified a while ago while I was busy not looking at it lol. Anyway I've looked at other alternatives from the link and from selfhosting communities and both OpenGist and ExBin are looking at the things for me to try next for comparison. Thanks for the guidance!

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