I thought the post was timely since the alert triggered today. The ntfy server was DDoS'd today and I got alerted pretty much instantly. It was quite nice.
Except that you can selfhost both healthchecks.io and ntfy.sh; and you can't selfhost reddit or any of the services they advertise, haha
I know you specifically asked for books, videos and podcasts, but I have actually personally never found any books, videos or podcasts I tried super inspiring or helpful. The only thing I have done on occasion is to use Pluralsight courses to learn a particular language or platform really fast (Android development, React, ...).
What I can really recommend though is to just read Hacker News and get inspired by what other people do. I find only about 10% or so actually interesting, but there's always something fascinating.
Aside from that, I learned most of my programming knowledge (not necessarily engineering knowledge) from side projects. For about a year now I have worked on a push notification service called ntfy that truly fulfills me, and that forces me to constantly learn new things.
I actually used to do the same thing. I read the Ceph documentation up and down. Eventually I tried to install Ceph and realized that what is written and what you actually do are really different, and that Ceph is an awful beast that you should not underestimate.
I am the only user on my instance, and it's a true pain in the neck. IMHO you should be able to add other instances in the UI, and then community lists should be exchanged by these instances automatically, so that I don't have to do the URL-copy dance every time.
Yeah it leads to an awful 404 error. The subscribing to other communities is such a pain in the neck anyways. That should be super high on the list IMHO. But I guess there are so many things that are high on the list, haha.
I don’t know how to make a link that automatically sends you to your specific instances
Oh that would be great to have. Manually copying things in the URL bar is less than ideal.
I know this is not the right audience for this, but that is an exceptional move on Meta's side, and the timing is perfect. Meta has produced so much garbage with the metaverse and all that stuff, so this seems like the first good idea they had in a while.
I don't know what I'm doing either. Lemmy is super buggy too which is annoying. But I think this is a good development. The ntfy sub wasn't all that busy anyway so it was a no-brainer.
As for my personal subs, I'll miss them. A lot of them.
I haven't even been using it for day, and I share your disappointment. However, I understand that Lemmy is in its infancy. There are huge UX hurdles to overcome, and it's a lot for two developers to carry. The hope is that more devs will join, and make a good UX -- For what it's worth, the UI is quite neat IMHO, it's just the UX with regards to federation and discoverability.
Having a ways to add instances and then replicate community lists would be a start. Having to manually fiddle with URLs of other communities is weird.
I'd pay good money for "Relay for Lemmy", assuming that the momentum sticks.
Thank you for the kind words. Feel free to recommend ntfy to your (nerd) friends if you like, haha.