I’m thinking about deploying my own instance where I’d be the only user and most probable I won’t have any communities.
The only thing there will be my account to interact with as many other instances as I want.
What would be de pros and cons of having my account like this?
Would it be harder to interact with other instances in some way?
Personally I think it’s a great idea. I run my own instance even though I’m the only user and have no communities.
Pros:
Moderation: Your own moderation capabilities. It’s your choice what you see or don’t see.
Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don’t have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.
Performance: Generally speaking you’ll have better performance. You won’t have to worry about an influx of new users taking the instance down due to overloads.
Cons:
Domain: You need your own domain, which is an ongoing cost.
Hosting: Like the domain, you need to pay for hosting to run Lemmy. You could try running it at home, but I would not recommend it.
Management: Depending on how you setup Lemmy, there will probably be ongoing maintenance work. It might not be worth the hassle when you can just use a third party instance and let them deal with it.
Ultimately it’s up to you.
I agree. Single person instances are really good for the health of the fediverse. If people can, and want that level of control, they should.
RE: cost. I’m doing a digital ocean droplet for $6 month which seems plenty for running Lemmy. So that’s $72 a year, plus maybe $20 for a domain name. So generally speaking if you can budget about $10 a month for your social media habit it can be done.
I’m also running a $12 DO droplet (for Akkoma microblogging/“twitter” software) so my total costs are a little higher, but still i find its a reasonable trade off for my habits.
Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don’t have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.
Conversely, this is the main thing keeping me from setting up my own instance. You have to do your own backups and keep everything running. If you mess up, you loose your whole identity. I’m a software engineer, but I’m a mediocre sys admin. I have the technical skills to host my own instance but I don’t want the stress of getting it right.
I’m a software engineer, but I’m a mediocre sys admin. I have the technical skills to host my own instance but I don’t want the stress of getting it right.
Although an alternative way to look at it is that is could be a great way to hone your devops / SRE skills. Even if that’s not the direction you really want your career to head, it can never hurt to have a really good understanding of that side of the industry.
Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don’t have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.
Conversely, this is the main thing keeping me from setting up my own instance. You have to do your own backups and keep everything running. If you mess up, you loose your whole identity. I’m a software engineer, but I’m a mediocre sys admin. I have the technical skills to host my own instance but I don’t want the stress of getting it right.
I personally haven’t had any issues with doing so! I run a few instances of different software in the Fediverse:
- Matrix
- Mastodon
- PeerTube
- Lemmy
Of them all, I found that Lemmy and Matrix were the easiest to “get into” due to the fact that its incredibly easy to subscribe to a remote community, and instantly be able to see posts from that community. Same principal with Matrix as well! I even went ahead and put up my Lemmy instance on a domain that wasn’t directly tied to my name so that others could have an account as well (Whereas for example, I wouldn’t really expect someone to want a
@username:russ.networkhandle for Matrix, other than myself).This is exactly what I have been doing. I enjoy this way of interacting with Fedi.
Pros:
- No reliance on the charity of others.
- Refresh as many times as you want without worrying about server load.
- Decide exactly which apps to host, and how they look and feel.
Cons:
- Hosting costs money/time.
- Interacting with remote instances is sometimes a little more work as you have to copy URLs and paste them in your search, and you’re less likely to have already fetched content because of other users subscribing to these remote instances.
Generally interacting with other instances works just fine. Especially on Mastodon I hardly ever notice I’m on a single user instance. Lemmy because of its different style of application (e.g. it’s more common to link to posts) presents empty posts a bit more often but I hope a bit more proactive fetching of remote content can be added at some point.
Hosting your own instances may not be for everyone but it is for me, and I can recommend it.
Yeah, what I was also thinking is if for some reason the instance decides to close then I’d lose my posts and comments.
I’ll give it a try, I have some free time and space on my server xD
One nice thing is you can always access lemmy as long as your server is up. lemmy.ml has been down a bit recently and although never for too long, I can access all the posts and comments that have already been made on the lemmy.ml communities I’m subscribed to and also other instances, like beehaw.org. And I don’t know how much of an issue this is now, but if lemmy.ml gets an image upload size limit, if you host your own instance you can upload as big images as you want (there’s a bit of a bug with that but still).
I can access all the posts and comments that have already been made on the lemmy.ml communities
does this mean during this time you’re viewing an outdated version of the thread? what if you try to comment at that moment? would it error out or update automatically in place when the instance comes back online?
It’s not outdated because the intance it’s on is down anyway. And i think (but I’m not sure) if you comment, the comment would go to the other online instances EG. beehaw/lemmy.one but when the instance the community was hosted on came back they wouldn’t see the comments unless they explicitly searched for the comment id.
Again, I’m not sure but thats my guess. But either way you can still read the old comments. If reddit went down you couldn’t even look at existing comments.
Sorry if formatting is weird, jerboa keeps deleting my spaces for some reason.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned yet: sometimes an instance blocks another, but you may still want to see and reply to their users in a community used by both instances. Having your own instance gives you more control over which instances to federate and block, if there isn’t an instance which is already aligned with your attitudes.
I still don’t fully understand the federation of instances, do other instances have to do something so I can interact with them? Or will it be only on my side?
When you follow a user or group, that is a request that the originating instance send messages from that group or user to your instance. However, if that group or user is banned from your instance, your instance will not accept the messages.
If the remote instance is blocked entirely, you won’t be able to fetch content from there at all in order to subscribe in the first place, and your messages won’t be forwarded along to that instance. A server block means that the two websites are no longer communicating with each other.
Moderating remote communities is a bit buggy and obviously you can’t create new communities on remote servers.
Normal usage is pretty much ok though.
This is what I’m doing, so far I’ve got a few threads from other instances where the comments haven’t been fetched, and it’s a bit of a pain to have to manually add communities you want to subscribe to. Still worth it though imo, it’s fun to have my own server.
Yeah, I also thought about that, but I think once I have my own instance it’ll be easier to also contribute to the project and find improvements for this :)
I think a con that I’m realizing (running my own instance) is I’m pretty much posting into the void until other instances federate with me. My understanding is I cannot post to a community on an instance where I do not have an account.
You can actually, it’s what I’m doing right now. You just need to initially add the instance through the search bar. Obviously they could always have a whitelist, or remove the connection, but lemmy.ml doesn’t seem to do that right now.
Interesting. Commenting has been fine but I didn’t see an option to create a new post to a remote community. I’ll play with it some more!
@knova You have to search for the remote community and subscribe to it. It will then appear in the list of communities you can choose from when you are composing a new post
Yes. I see now it’s possible from the post creator. I had no problem subscribing to remote communities, but I did not initially see them in my post creation form. I went back and double checked and of course they were there the entire time 😅
I run my own instance… Only for me.
It runs on s 2-core VM beside ejabberd and matrix-synapse.
You can follow each community you want, and create Communities, others can follow.
Just do it.
I’m wondering the same. I assume you have control over the domain name so you can further customize your username but not sure what else there is to it.
One related question I have about this: How much ongoing storage would one expect for this kind of instance? My understanding is that the fediverse is push-based, so if I run my own instance that means that all communities I subscribe to are pushing updates to my instance which presumably get stored in a database somewhere. It seems like that could really add up to a lot of data.
I’ve had my instance running for a month now, and currently my
volumesfolder (which holds all the data for Lemmy) is only 493M, so I don’t foresee any storage issues!From what I understand, any images from other communities don’t actually get replicated to your instance (you just see a link to where it is saved on the original community), but I could be wrong on that.
If that’s true about images that does greatly reduce my concern. Text is small and easily compressed. That said, I fully hope to see multiple orders of magnitude of increased traffic if/as Lemmy gains traction.
