Hey. I did this, I self host a lot of stuff and at some point it just became my default setting. In this case though I dont think its really that valuable unless you’re planning on hosting your own communities and moderate users and whatnot which comes with its own admin burden. Not to deter you or anything. I used a modified docker compose, so you’d need some way to host lemmy, lemmy’s UI server and a database backend, and a reverse proxy in front… DNS and SSL certificates… Its kinda intermediate to highly technical to host your own I guess? Would I recommend it to someone not technical? No, unless you were really keen and looking for a project to expand your skills a bit. 😉
I’m certain you could figure it out if you’re interested, but IMO there’s not much benefit to individual users running instances unless you want to gather a community.
I would say the benefits are control of downtime. Hosting your own instance makes you responsible for your maintenance. If you maintain your own and federate with other instances, you still have an experience if another instance goes down, you just wont see that particular content. If you use someone elses instance as your “home” instance and it goes down, your account goes down with it.
The only points of potential issues with self hosting are if the activitypub protocol itself goes down, or something to do with your own instance such as going down itself or becoming defederated.
What about letting people gather a community (on your server)?
I mean the big instances will be “full” one day no? I love the decentralisation part of Lemmy too so that is partly why I’m trying to get a small server up and running.
Nah, big instances don’t get full, they get just get bigger.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from self hosting. It’s absolutely within anyone’s reach and could be a very rewarding pursuit. I would 100% encourage anyone to learn about self hosting in general. I also do not mean to imply that you or anyone else doesn’t have what it takes.
That said, I’ve found my own self hosting efforts to be a little bit like a new puppy. It’s a big commitment and once the shine wears off it might be more of a responsibility than you bargained for. In my experience things do go wrong unexpectedly. When others are depending on you, you can find yourself in a situation where you have to put your life on hold for several hours trying to figure out what’s gone wrong.
So in summary, it would be a cool thing to do but too much of a commitment for me.
Yeah, I don’t really know for sure but I don’t think that’s a significant risk at present. IDK anything about lemmy’s architecture specifically but I would be surprised if even a large instance like world is approaching a hard limit.
Cost will become a factor but even 1 in 1000 users donating $5 a month is probably enough to have a surplus.
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