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What are the incentives for hosting a Lemmy instance?
(lemmy.fmhy.ml)
Making spez cry
One of the highest honors of all.
for personal use, main reasons are you won't have to worry about instance admins making arbitrary decisions that you don't agree with, and no worries about server overload or downtime.
for making an instance for public, helping fediverse become a more viable alternative by spreading the load over more instances and helping it grow.
But doesn't one need to federate with all the instances to be visible and view others? Say I'm self-hosting a personal instance that only I use, could I see every post from every instance from the get-go?
No, you only see federated communities that someone on your instance has subscribed to. So at first there is nothing but you can theoretically see every post by subscribing to every community in every instance.
It's pretty much what I'm doing, and it's not so hard. Pick the top 10 instances, subscribe to the communities with interesting stuff.
I think this should be the default user experience actually. Just being given a list of popular communities both on the same instance and on other instances, as part of the sign-up.
Once the stupid meta threads launches, it will be very good at being super user friendly. And this is where open source products sometimes fails. It's hard and time consulting to make something as simple as it can be.
My reasons are 1-I have total control over my data and don't ever have to worry about losing my account because of somebody else and 2-Because I just like participating in things like this that I believe in
plus using your own domain is cool
Actually, you're right. That was also a big reason I did it lol
you possum and toad guys....
I was actually wondering where my data is going when I comment when I have my own instance. Since I wouldn't have any communities in my instance my data is still being saved in the instance of the community that I'm talking in? So if an instance decided one day to delete everything I would still lose that data anyway? Or is a copy of all my comments and posts saved in my instance as well?
It would seem unless you are going to create communities in your own instance nothing would really change data wise.
I'm just going to someone else's home and writing something on their fridge. And then the owner burns the fridge. I think is an analogy?
Every server that federated the post will retain a local copy of it that can be interacted with. The control over my data is mostly me having control of what info gets put out there about me personally and who can access my private data on lemmy
you get a higher degree of control over your view and defederating from another instance is not as much of an impact to the network in general. also less issues running bots on your own hardware, you can host bigger files, etc etc.
To me the only benefit in defederation is in blocking instances with illegal content. I would never use StackOverflow if there was a chance of not seeing the top answer to the questions I search.
most instances based in jurisdictions with rules similar to your own will do a good job on thier own policing and removing that content, the ones that don't will be in hot water.
im more thinking of things that are often subjective and more marginal like the disposition of various levels of NSFW or other highly divisive content. On your own instance, for just you and yours, its less of an issue just removing what you dont want to see and as an admin the blocks are much more effective. If you are a big instance taking those stances becomes a big show every time and it can be why some instances my not or be slow to react to content on the margins.
For a personal instance, no one cares, its like you are blocking something in your personal email client.
A more broad incentive is just participating in and helping the decentralized community.
If you host your own instance you are your own admin. That gives you personal control over content and settings. However, you need to pay for a domain name and you need a 24/7 server so there's some expense involved. Then there's maintenance like software updates and user needs if you take them on.
I think most admins take on an instance simply to contribute in building the Fediverse and create something to take some pride in. You get some clout in the community for doing that.
I tried setting up an instance for my personal use today out of curiosity. So far the most notable personal benefits have been much more responsive site and easier time curating what I seeon my feed. The latter is easy enough since my feed only includes posts from communities people on my instance have subscribed to... which is also quite a downside since I'm the only one on the instance...
Oh and I'm able to federate with whomever I want, compared to if I were on lemmy.world, I couldn't see posts from beehaw.org and vice versa. I'll also sleep soundly knowing that the stupid pictures I'll be uploading (too lazy to upload them on external site) won't be filling up someone else's precious servers.
https://lemmy.todayyoutomorrow.me/post/850
Use the LCS app to add communities automatically to your instance. I was quite disappointed to see that I had to manually add every community and wouldn't be able to have the classic ALL page I was used to but this solved that. It runs on a schedule and automatically adds communities based on your criteria.
Thanks for the tip! I thought something like this probably exists, but didn't have energy to look it up after the installation fatigue. I'm not quite yet decided whether I want to add communities manually or automate it, I'll probably first see whether I'll add a couple of friends to the instance or not, and what they might think.
Even if I don't add anyone to the instance, using All as a type of custom feed would be an option too, adding communities more liberally than I would for Subscribed... Perhaps the way Lemmy does this isn't as bad as I first thought!
How much ballache was it to set up? Docker compose up or much fucking about?
It was... a project. I'm guessing if one has more experience in hosting it would be easier to figure out. I kept running into error after error, but eventually after spending most of the day on it I did somehow get it working... for now.
After all that I open Lemmy and see a post about easy deploy (linked by squid in response to your comment)... So I decided to give it a try and instance was up in minutes without any errors or issues. That was both very nice and very painful to see!
Warm and fuzzies
I just set up mine! Because i'm soooo fucking based and so fucking cool :3
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
62 points (98.4% liked)
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