Trans Tech DIY

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Trans people can to build our own tech to serve our own needs. A community for meeting like-minded helpers & sharing what we learn.

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TransTechDIY: A concept (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The premise is simple: we're all better off in a world where trans people know how to build our own technologies to suit the needs of our communities. Trans people are better off when we are well-connected and are able to DIY. And it's now more than ever important for us to learn how to DIY our tech the same way so many of us have DIY'd our hormones.

The most immediate threat I think many online trans communities are currently facing is deplatforming. Many have been lulled into a sense of dependency by large tech companies. Self-hosting seems like all too overwhelming, the fediverse seems overwhelming, the UIs are overwhelming, archiving data seems overwhelming, starting from scratch and building communities on new instances seems overwhelming, helping users who are less tech literate migrate to safe platforms seems overwhelming.

I would like to suggest this is a problem we can resolve. I think we could start small, and we could just share with each other various problems we see in our communities when it comes to technology—barriers to entry, designs that simply do not work, etc.—and the solutions we've found to help resolve them for each other.

Alternatively, if you're having a problem or facing resistance getting people onboarded in your communities—post about it! Let's have a chat. Maybe someone knows a matrix room you should be apart of. Maybe someone has dealt with a particular type of user apathy in a Discord they've modded & can provide some hard won lessons learned.

In the long run, I think this information could be collated into a wiki resource of sorts. Of course not trying to replace the many many resources out there for learning individual technologies. But more like a landing page for the trans community to get started fixing common problems.

However, I am of course still working on learning myself, so I think if this community grows it will be a function of who shows up and where things go.

Feel free to discuss or share feedback, it's just an idea at this point.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

I might be biased because I can "sudo nano (edit the config file)" to do all the things manually like a nerd but I don't think self-hosting is that kind of impossible. It's not terrible for a layman to do in practice if you use prewrapped things like docker containers and proxmox. I think the average person can do it if spoonfed with the right documentation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Yeaaaahhh... You're waaaay overestimating the technical ability of the average person. I'm fairly tech savvy and my eyes glazed over when I tried to figure out how to set up docker for something (I eventually figured it out, but ye).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah I presumed the thing that wrapped everything in neat boxes was easier than the manual way of doing things (ssh and all that visibly scares average people).

I just run most of the junk bare metal and edit the configs manually because I don't care to learn much more than that. Ironically the thing that should make things easier to set up sounds like a real pain in the ass to set up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, it was still easier than doing it manually, buuuuut... It was still a bit confusing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 minutes ago

Yeah I do feel the same. I'm a person who works in tech but doesn't usually set up servers. Even though it's not my first rodeo it's not exactly easy—it's a project. And I did get stuck on a bug setting up a Lemmy server that I need to peek at again maybe tomorrow or on the weekend.

That said I have some thoughts on this from talking to people. I think I'll make a quick post about it because I think it's a worthwhile discussion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I don’t know about the average person but certainly enough people yes! But most don’t try unless they have a bit of encouragement and community

I’m actually surprised at how many people will say they think Lemmy is unuseable. I have found that instead of explaining the fediverse they respond better to “it’s Reddit but better because it’s not beholden to any company or country” or something similar

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

I wasn't a fan of lemmy's UI until I got ahold of the clone of old.reddit version this site hosts.

Beyond that it's just explaining that new button that differentiates between the fediverse "all" and "local" pages on the particular instance whoever made their account on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 24 minutes ago* (last edited 23 minutes ago)

So this is a kinda interesting thing. I've had two people in my networks who expressed hesitation because of UX. One was excited to find out that her fav 3rd party apps moved here. The other was excited to find old reddit.

I genuinely think a lot of people feel new Reddit is just enshittification they don't need or want.

I had a few questions though, if you don't mind me picking your brain!

How does this old Reddit cloning work? Is it something each instance can decide to host, or is it native to Lemmy?
If it's tied to a specific instance, how do you know that this option exists? Is there a general way to find out specifics like this that I can point people to? It looks like it's listed in this instances sidebar. Is that how it usually works on most instances?

I'll pass the info along to at least one person!