I… can’t see anywhere where they are complaining? This was just a post about how much the server cost to run. They updated it over time with new numbers as they beefed up the server capacity. But the post basically says “Here’s how much it costs to run, and we have plenty of money”. I don’t see the complaining?
It helps to understand what ChatGPT is, and what it isn’t.
ChatGPT does not understand anything you say. And it only does one word (technically part of a word, but to keep it simple) at a time.
What it’s doing is it is guessing the most likely next word based on the words that have come before it. If you think of you phone’s keyboard, it probably has word suggestions for what to say next. ChatGPT is like hitting the recommended word over and over until it has an answer. It’s spouting words based on how likely the word is to come next. That is all.
It uses advanced machine learning to do that, but whether it counts as AI is for the reader to decide. But it’s certainly not planning out a thoughtful answer for you.
And that’s not even taking into account that the training data largely comes from the internet, the place where people continuously make shit up.
I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the “main” instances. I don’t know exactly what concerned people
One of, if not the most active lemmy instance is a Marxist, pro-Russian war, pro-CCP, pro-North Korea community. When I signed up on lemmy.ml a while back, it was almost all you saw.
The problem with reddit alternatives is that, until now, the only people leaving reddit were the ones kicked off. They needed new homes and they found them in unmoderated communities they could host themselves, like lemmy.
Some of us have been waiting for some time for more “average” redditors to make the move, so this exodus is like Christmas coming early.
You don’t have to host a node if you don’t want to.
But if you do, you may find it’s surprisingly easy to set one up with very little technical knowledge. Docker has benefits in containerizing, yes, but it also makes things easy (which is why it’s so popular).
In most cases you just install Linux, run through the docker install process (many VPS providers can do these first two parts for you), download a pre-made docker-compose.yml file from whichever service you are trying to run, then run “docker compose up -d” and it just works.
Running more services on the same machine, adding a reverse proxy, etc, require a bit more work. But once you have those set up it’s simple to integrate further services running in docker.
But let me reiterate my first point - just because others are asking you to do something, doesn’t mean you have to do it :)
80/20 rule.
When you are creating something like Lemmy, where you want wide uptake, you need to pander to the masses.
The /r/selfhosted surveys show around half of self-hosters mostly or exclusively use docker. A significant portion of the rest can use docker if needed.
If you’re in the 20% that isn’t covered by the most common setup, then it can be frustrating. But supporting that 20% takes as much effort as supporting the other 80% (see 80/20 rule), and when things are new it’s just not where the effort should be focused.
So you have all those servers, but why can’t you install debian or ubuntu server on one of them?
You could also get a $2/month VPS and run it on that. Beehaw is run on something similar (though apparently $12 a month, but a lot more users).
Are they not? The donation page says “This Collective’s Fiscal Host is a registered 501©(3) non-profit organization. Your contribution will be tax-deductible in the US, to the extent allowed by the law.”
I presumed this was based on the umbrella you were accepted under to be on opencollective?