I’ve been playing with googles search indexing and my personal instance. My instance is a subdomain named lemmy of my vanity URL I’ve kept for years. One thing I’ve noticed is that even though I run an instance with one user and one community, my personal website under the domain - which is static and lame - has risen from 50th to 23rd with certain search terms.

My point relative to the original question is that lemmy seems to be inherently interesting to googles crawlers and spiders and wtevs.

Aside from their propensity to gang-rape, ducks are pretty cool. I’m not being edgy. Look it up.

Two things:

1. Never settle!

2. I’ve found the Wemos D1 mini to be a better tool for automating larger numbers of things. They operate on similar principles but are actually internet capable, so they can have a simple web interface and keep accurate time. Software like Tasmota makes all that pretty easy. They can use a communication protocol MQTT to speak to each other and create really complex scenarios.

For instance, say your porch light is connected to one. You can have it announce to the network that the porch light just came on and have the other exterior lights listen for that announcement and then change their behavior accordingly.

It’s a lovely and attainable dream! I’m stuck in an urban apartment right now but I’ve automated my balcony garden to keep the plants healthy and watered even when I have to leave town.

That is an epic niche. Primitive skills are awesome. Have you ever read The Toaster Project? It’s a story about the attempt to build a ‘simple’ modern appliance starting with raw materials and only using primitive methods. Very insightful look into how complex our built environment really is.

I’m really into electronics and plants. Together. I grew up on a farm with greenhouses so my interest in control systems, electricity and plants developed all together. I’ve built growth chambers, plant lights, automated waterers and yet none of that was for weed.

‘Gender assigned at birth’ is a field in most electronic health care records for real healthcare based reasons. It means very specific things and is called out separately from legal sex and genetic info for real life-altering reaons. The vocabulary exists for far more serious reasons than to annoy you online. Frankly, it’s not even about you.

I’m making myself be active here. I’m learning to build my own lemmy instance on a VPS.

I want there to be a sea change in social media. I want an authentic intellectual conversation. I was in college during the usenet era and found it easy to find mind expanding stuff there with a minimum of toxicity.

My hope is the community and software mature steadily together until it is ready to handle a significant influx.

Let’s not reward toxicity. We need to steer the conversation and the software development to reward quality engagement over quantity.

I’m still hacking away on my attempt to establish an instance on a DigitalOcean droplet. I’m not a professional sys admin, just a linux hobbyist but this does seem like the easiest way to make a small instance withiut the extra overhead of home hosting.

My total cost should be under $8 a month until I get more than a handful of users, if that ever happens. My main goal really is just a bit more control than the R-place allows.