I would not consider Mermaid complete enough for network diagramming. The very basics are possible, but try to describe anything more complicated throws off the placement and makes the pathing whacky.
Straight flow charts are the closest you can get to a network diagram, so if you try to draw a link that travels back up the chart, it breaks mermaid’s brain trying to figure out the order of decision points (network devices).
The allure of text based diagrams is so tantalizing - but if you need them to be functional, it’s not going to happen
There’s an issue tracking the need a new diagram type to handle it.
Communities limited to local participation could still be perfectly visible to other instances. I don’t see many downsides.
The only question is, is there a point? Anyone can sign up and post, it’d just be a kind of rate-limiter for remote instances that don’t police their own sign-ups well
I evaluated both and decided pretty quickly that lemmy was the way to go.
I bounced off of the sign-up and initial subscription setup a few times, unfortunately it was during that business with beehaw and I still have ‘pending’ subscriptions that will never be allowed or recieved :P
All in all, the things that made me pick lemmy were:
The atmosphere in discussions (the agora on sh.itjust.works was having excellent back and forth)
Documentation for self-hosting and openness of the code
Selfawareness of problems the platform faced
The boom in 3rd party apps
Even I have to admit, most of my reasons were lucky, timely and niche.
I would not consider Mermaid complete enough for network diagramming. The very basics are possible, but try to describe anything more complicated throws off the placement and makes the pathing whacky.
Straight flow charts are the closest you can get to a network diagram, so if you try to draw a link that travels back up the chart, it breaks mermaid’s brain trying to figure out the order of decision points (network devices).
The allure of text based diagrams is so tantalizing - but if you need them to be functional, it’s not going to happen
There’s an issue tracking the need a new diagram type to handle it.