freedit VS flyctl

I've been checking out some of the reddit alternative software as of late, not so much the many different servers and communities around. Ones I've liked:

Kbin https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core

Lotide https://todo.sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide

Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Brutalinks https://sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks/

Those all (are supposed to) federate. I don't think federation in these communities is always ideal, drive by posting and what not, I think a better approach would be a client that can read your followed stuff from a local list. But some non-federating options are:

StackerNews https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news

Comment Castles https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles

freedit https://github.com/freedit-org/freedit

There are lots more, some are great some not. There have been quite a few posted on this site in recent days. Some communities really just need forums or wikis, link aggregation and content voting aren't really always necessary.

I do believe communities should host their own sites. Some communities just don't have the interest to be viable long term, and Reddit was away to externalize cost so that non viable communities can continue to exist. We see the results of that now, a company that isn't profitable due to bearing costs that nobody else is willing to bear squeezing users to try to stay afloat. This was always a temporary state of affairs. If you can't find a single community member dedicated enough to keep a VPS running, or with large communities, you can't scrounge up enough money from donations or whatever to keep the server running, that community simply isn't viable.

As you can see that almost all of these are very new projects, it could have been a bit bigger but I didn't include Reddit alternatives, that is why you don't see the main Lemmy repo and Freedit not being linked here.

To begin with, you could go with a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider like Heroku, or Fly for a more seamless experience. You can also do a bit of DevOps: set up a Docker installation on a VPS and deploy your app there.

To begin visit fly.io to create an account. Next install flyctl a command line tool for creating and deploying fly apps. macOS

For frontend deployment, I used Netlify (for the generous free package) and the recommended fly.io for server + database (also cheap package).

Create an account on Fly.io.

You can learn more about fly.io and tigris, we will need to create an account on both platforms for this project regardless. Anyway with the theory out of the way let's get started in the next section as we create our accounts and start building the app.

Fly.io is a platform that helps you run your apps and databases closer to your users all around the world. It takes your app code, packages it up neatly, and puts it on virtual machines that can be quickly started or stopped. This makes your app faster for users and more reliable. Fly.io is easy to use, works well for small projects or personal apps. It's a great way to make sure your app runs smoothly for people no matter where they are.

In this post, we'll start from scratch, running FerretDB locally via Docker, trying out the connection with mongosh and the MongoDB Node.js client, and finally deploy FerretDB to Fly.io for a production ready set up.

2- fly.io

Fly is a cloud platform that focuses on global edge computing. Fly specializes in high-performance hosting and provides a global network of edge locations. Fly is known for its scalability and performance optimizations.

But videototextai.com is built using NextJS + Firebase auth + Firestore and a backend deployed at fly.io . Fly makes it really easy to deploy docker containers and that is IMO the fastest way to develop, you can setup a local setup