I’ve been curious about this also but for a different reason. I assume all my posts and comments are hosted at the instance I’m subscribed to. Should that server go down away for any reason my account and all its data would be lost right? I’d rather be in control of keeping my own data safe.

Just curious, which beehaw drama?

Edit: ah, scrolled down a bit and found this, assume that's it.

Other than that is there any obvious downside to doing that?

You must be able to administrate and pay for a server.
Apart from that, it would not be nice to participate in the network and use the computing capacity of others, but not bring any infrastructure into the network yourself (by registration lock).

Of course, you can host a private instance. That's the whole point if it being federated! Go for it!

I believe an instance can whitelist which would block all other instances and only allow ones it approves. I don't know of one that does that yet, but I could see beehaw doing that in the future—in which case, having a solo instance would not help.

What's happened to beehaw?

When people say "instances federate by default", they don't mean the instances engage in active content discovery. They mean the default behaviour when someone goes to look for content that's offsite is to connect to the remote instance.

Running a solo Lemmy or kbin instance puts all of the responsibility of content discovery on your own shoulders. You'll need to go out and scout other instances to see what you want to follow, and then subscribe to those sources in order to keep content flowing.

I highly recommend having a secondary account that you use to subscribe to things somewhat indiscriminately so you can separate out your subscribed feed from your all feed in a meaningful way.

That's perfectly fine!

Some downsides can be that you will pay a monthly fee to rent a server, or expose your home network to the internet (some risk, but for a personal instance the risk is not so high). With regards to how the federation works, you can use your instance to interact with other instances that use open federation (the default) without problem. I don't think that there is a way to subscribe to EVERYTHING. I have to manually fetch communities and subscribe to them to help populate my instance.

I've been thinking the same. Going to look up some guides later on to see how much of a hassle it would be.

I think when I looked at doing it with Mastodon, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze for a single user (this was months ago so might be different now) but Lemmy might be better suited.

There is one instance dedicated to mimicking /r/all: https://lemmy.directory/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/New/page/1

Check it out. Maybe it partially does what you want, maybe you can learn from them how to subscribe to everything.

would it be possible to selfhost a lemmy instance literally just for yourself and no one else to like, circumvent any defederation shenanigans?

I can imagine many people want a fully federated instance, myself included. Maybe I did not understand the value of defederation, but I think I can decide for myself to what communities I subscribe, or not.

So I do see value in an instance dedicated to not defederating anything, ever. Maybe it even already exists (please let me know). I tried to suggest you can share the instance with others, just make the policy perfectly clear.

There's already multiple instances of only one user for very similar reasons, so yeah, if that's what you want you can do it today

If I had figured out how to search for threads, I would point you to the thread from yesterday that got a bunch of comments. The answer is, yes, but.

It's not as efficient on the network, as it's a client getting all content for your subscriptions that isn't distributed to other users. But it will work just fine and has advantages like permanent account and control. Invite your friends, all it takes is one or two to make it worth the overhead.

It makes me think of when you sign up for a VPS like linode and they have a bunch of drop-in applications you can click to install. Like cpanel, wordpress etc. But you aren't really fully running it in the same way as if it was physically a device in your home. There are some pro admins taking care of some of the details.

I feel something like that would be the middle ground for people wanting independence without having to learn such deep systems admin skills.

That’s any interesting idea. Curious to see if it would work.