this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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[โ€“] snowe@lemmy.ml 34 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I started !programming.dev because I am a moderator of several 100k+ subs over on Reddit and I didn't want my communities to not have a place to go if Reddit crashed and burned (even though it's incredibly unlikely). The main sub I moderated (/r/ExperiencedDevs) for years wanted user verification to combat the spam that was newbies commenting and posting about things they didn't really know or understand. This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn't really care about their communities.

I am also a strong supporter of pulling control away from megacorps. We need more small to medium sized businesses on the planet.

For selfish reasons? I wanted to work on something new and have true ownership over it, the ability to build a community that worked together to build something without capitalism standing in the way. It might seem strange, but one of the first things I did was bring multiple other people on board to help me maintain the server, even going so far as to add domain managers to the domain name. This was all to counter the major questions people were asking around "what if the host decides they don't want to host anymore?". Well hopefully the programming.dev community is willing to take that burden if the time ever comes, even though I hope it doesn't. I also wanted to start something similar to a coop, where ownership is shared, meaning users have incentives to make the platform better. I have lots of ideas around this, but this will never be possible on Reddit. It is quite feasible here.

I also had the chance to buy an incredibly dope domain name! https://programming.dev! Why wouldn't I jump at that chance? And I get to even use it instead of let it flounder. So many reasons to host something like this, to build a trusting community, a safe space to have to let people talk about a shared love/topic/hobby.

[โ€“] jim@programming.dev 5 points 2 years ago

Totally agree with the dope domain name. Not going to lie, a big reason for picking programming.dev was to be /u/jim@programming.dev

[โ€“] GnothiSeauton@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didnโ€™t really care about their communities.

Just curious how you think you might go about this. Do you plan on contributing yourself, forking, or using the community to influence the direction/prioritization of new features?

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[โ€“] arthur@lemmy.ml 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

See this is good. The more the fediverse grows the more people find out what us old users have known for years and years:

You don't need to rely on large tech companies. The web is for everyone.

[โ€“] mobiuscoffee@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

It is pretty wild to think about how many people only know the internet as about 5 websites or apps..

[โ€“] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 19 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I already host my own stuff for the most part: emails, DNS, NextCloud, IRC server, IRC client (ZNC, The Lounge), my website and a few other things.

I already pay like $50/mo for a dedicated server so that I have complete control over my data and my digital life, so adding a Lemmy instance to the mix is basically free. Just another VM among many of them, sharing the same resources as the rest of the stuff I host.

I share my server with a few friends, and pretty much my friends and their friends are all free to use my stuff as well. Been doing that for about 14 years at this point: always let my friends put their PHP sites on my server and whatnot. A dozen people using my IRC bouncers, a handful of people on my IRC server. When people need a game server sometimes I hand them out a VM to run the server for a while, then when they're bored I turn it off and shelve it away. It's a lot nicer to foot the cost of a service when it's for people you know and care about.

I'm a FullStack + DevOps engineer as my day job, so it's pretty trivial for me to set up and maintain. If anything it's a bit relaxing compared to the insanity I deal with at work.


Regarding costs, the nice thing with distributed systems like Lemmy is that the average small to medium sized instance is really cheap to run. It's when you run into scaling problems as you grow that becomes painful and often expensive if you can't optimize the system. Suddenly you need way more servers, redundant databases, caching layers, spend a lot of time maintaining all of that, write automation to scale up more easily, etc.

Without federation, the whole ecosystem would go down, it puts a lot of pressure and a lot of need in maintaining reliability and performance. With federation, if my node goes down for a day or two, only a handful of users will complain about it, and all is well.

So in a way, many smaller instances distributes the cost of running the whole fediverse across many more people with much lower cost figures each, something one can afford to pay continuously even without taking in any donations. As I said, it cost me $50 for the whole server, but really I could probably run this on Oracle's free tier forever and never pay a dime for my Lemmy experience.

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[โ€“] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

We run ours, because we are two trans women that are fortunate enough to be able to afford to run an instance that specifically prioritises the needs of our community. It's a way of using our privilege to create safe community spaces

[โ€“] vis4valentine@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago

Fantastic. You go girls ๐Ÿฅฐ

[โ€“] PorkrollPosadist@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

Here's one perspective: https://runyourown.social/

Personally, I run a Mastodon+Hometown server for around 100 people and it costs me about $30/mo. It costs me more to fill my car's gas tank. I could maybe start a patron or something, but at this stage, it is not even necessary.

About 3 years ago, I was a member of r/ChapoTrapHouse, which got banned from Reddit. The day after this happened, we had over 10,000 people sitting in a lifeboat Discord "server." Within the community, we had the experience and willpower to take Lemmy, kick the tires, make a couple adjustments which were necessary for our community, and make sure we weren't doing malpractice by hosting it. This all happened before Federation had been implemented in Lemmy.

Maintaining the fork was labor intensive, and a lot of the original developers burned out. We couldn't afford wages for development (the site still only exists due to volunteers), but the hosting costs were easily covered by user donations.

[โ€“] soupspoon@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

That's weird, your username isn't displayed for me, just your profile pic

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[โ€“] flashgnash@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago (4 children)

As far as I understand it currently people host their own Lemmy instances just for the hell of it or out of the goodness of their heart

But the larger instances will end up costing more money and I'm doubtful that will be sustainable with no income

[โ€“] Dawn@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Alot of the larger instances have user donations set up so that the servers can be maintained, this is how lemmy.world works

[โ€“] subtext@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

You can do your part! I set up a recurring donation recently, recurring donations are much better for the sustainment of an instance since the owner knows they can keep running and not have to worry about intermittent donations.

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[โ€“] dandroid@dandroid.app 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I decided to host my own because I was on lemmy.world and we got blocked by beehaw, which had many of the communities I wanted to be a part of. I run mine on a server that's in my house, so the only thing I'm paying for is electricity. And I have solar panels.

[โ€“] jason@lemmy.weiser.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

lol I was the same way. I went from not being able to see just beehaw to spotty federation with many other instances (oddly enough beehaw and the kbin instances are nearly perfect), so I'm not yet sure if it was an upgrade.

[โ€“] dandroid@dandroid.app 1 points 2 years ago

What's funny is I feel like my instance has spotty federation with lemmy.world, but everything else is pretty good. I wonder what's going on over there.

[โ€“] pepsison52895@lemmy.one 1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

How difficult is it to host your own instance? Can you still use apps like Connect with it?

[โ€“] dandroid@dandroid.app 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It was really annoying to set up if I'm being honest. If I hadn't taken classes on Docker, I would have never figured it out. Luckily they have been improving the process recently. It already much easier now than it was a week ago. Hopefully by the next major release it is easy peasy.

[โ€“] pepsison52895@lemmy.one 1 points 2 years ago

Good to know! Sounds like another reason for me to start learning Docker.

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[โ€“] bzImage@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

i Have a homelab, i work and design computer/server/linux/security solutions for enterprises from my home. Lemmy is just another docker process in my lab.

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[โ€“] taaz@biglemmowski.win 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I love playing with computers. That's about it in general.

I've been using Hetzner to get dedicated hosts before and I have had two mediocre servers as a playground for some time now so why not add another service to the stack, arr-I mean yeah

[โ€“] ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I do because I want to control my data and it runs on a VPS that also serves as my email server, amongst other small things. I pay about $20 USD a month which is nothing to keep my data from grubby hands. Though I must admit it was a lot of work getting my mail server running smoothly and it requires some tlc every now and again.

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[โ€“] HorseFD@lemmy.buzz 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I'm hosting my own because it's fun and it's cheap to do it. I imagine it could get expensive to host bigger instances, and at that point the admins would likely look to donations to keep things going.

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[โ€“] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I host my own. Specifically for myself and those who are friends or friends of friends.

I have a cluster of servers operating in my garage. Free real-estate for tons of stuff I want to host. I have to "pay" for electricity... the rest was already paid for long ago. My electricity cost for my whole cluster... is an estimated $1750 a year. But that cluster is 160 CPU cores, 750 GB of RAM, and ~400TB of storage. You ain't getting that on a cloud hosted provider for $145 a month. About $110 of that is subsidized by my business operations. I host email, websites, nextcloud, plex, etc... boatloads of stuff.

[โ€“] datendefekt@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

You offer paid hosting with hardware in your garage? I'm getting dot-com flashbacks!

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[โ€“] imgprojts@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Since devices that compute generate heat, it is a good way to hear your home up in the PNW. Additionally, you get to host websites. Everyone wins.

Better if you mine crypto, cuz any profit is just extra. You get the same results as if you were using a wall heater but you also get something in return.

[โ€“] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 3 points 2 years ago

Also (in theory) you can stick a VPN in front of it to hide your home IP to prevent DDoS attacks etc.

[โ€“] sunaurus@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (8 children)

I really like the overall concept of Lemmy, so I decided to set up lemm.ee to support the Lemmy network with my skillset. I have previously had the privilege of being responsible for running large platforms online (end-to-end, everything from operations to software engineering), and so far, this experience seems to be extremely relevant for running Lemmy in its current state.

As for paying for hosting, my initial plan was to to just pay for everything myself as kind of a hobby, but the userbase at lemm.ee has been very gracious in first asking me several times to share costs, and then actually sending money once I set up donations. I'm not sure yet if this donations-based funding will be sustainable, or if it will fall off after the initial hype dies, but for now it's really awesome to see that there are several other people who believe in lemm.ee and want to share financial responsibility for it.

[โ€“] octopus5866@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I've been hosting a gaming server plus other related stuff myself for some years now.

While the user base will definitely be different, relying solely on donations is unfortunately not sustainable long-term. Donations fluctuate massively based on time of year in my experience. So it's always good to periodically remind your community that lemm.ee needs donations to survive long-term.

When I do those reminders, users come out of the woods in droves to donate. It's less that they're unwilling to donate and more that they just forget to donate.

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[โ€“] tmpod@lemmy.pt 3 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I've loved the idea behind Lemmy since I first discovered. At first, I was using lemmy.ml, but then I saw the opportunity to provide a nice space and expand my sysadmin skills. Since there was no Portuguese instance yet, I thought why not create one?
Since then, I've met more people hosting Portuguese services and it has been great :D

For funding, I'm working on two ways: the typical donations and trying to secure support from local FOSS organizations. At the moment, the server costs are not prohibitive and there have been some donations already. I've also been talking to some of those orgs and it's going well :)

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I've just launched one:

lemmy.fosshost.com

Why?

  • I get free hosting with my job
  • I'm a FOSS enthusiast and want to contribute to the fediverse
[โ€“] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Why?

Seemed fun to do. Wanted to support something that gets people away from reddit.

How did I pay for it? I have a miniature datacenter in my house, complete with redundant power. Hosting lemmy is a drop in the bucket as far as my resources are concerned. As such, there really isn't a measured cost for it. The infrastructure was already there and running, and lemmy doesn't consume much of it.

I don't take donations.

[โ€“] mrmanager@lemmy.today 3 points 2 years ago

I host my own because it's cheap, less than 10 dollars per month, and I wanted to contribute to the growth of the Lemmy community.

Also turns out that it's another benefit to this: I don't have to get involved in the entire political debate of who federated with who. I just subscribe to communities I want anywhere.

[โ€“] chrisbit@cocte.au 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Since a lot of you are here, are there any good communities for Lemmy admin discussion?

I know for sure that there's a Matrix community, which is where a good amount of discussion takes place.

[โ€“] atheos@lemmy.atheos.org 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I setup my own instance so that I could have some control over my alias, and pretty much because I can.

You can go a long way with free cloud offerings from both Amazon and Oracle and setup a decent sized instance. I set mine up at a data-center where I manage unrelated services, but I take full advantage of Amazon & Oracle for side projects. DigitalOcean would be another low cost option, as you can run a small lemmy instance on a pretty modest droplet. You'll get the most horsepower from Oracle always free if you can manage to find one of their regions with available resources. (it can be a challenge)

[โ€“] meyotch@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 years ago

Iโ€™m still hacking away on my attempt to establish an instance on a DigitalOcean droplet. Iโ€™m not a professional sys admin, just a linux hobbyist but this does seem like the easiest way to make a small instance withiut the extra overhead of home hosting.

My total cost should be under $8 a month until I get more than a handful of users, if that ever happens. My main goal really is just a bit more control than the R-place allows.

[โ€“] neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space 1 points 2 years ago

I want my own space in the internet and I set aside money for it monthly from my paychecks

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