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?
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does this mean during this time you're viewing an outdated version of the thread?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It's not outdated because the intance it's on is down anyway.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.
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.
I personally haven't had any issues with doing so! I run a few instances of different software in the Fediverse:
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.network handle for Matrix, other than myself).
This is exactly what I have been doing. I enjoy this way of interacting with Fedi.
Pros:
Cons:
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.
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 volumes folder (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.
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.
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.
@lemmy.ml
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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@lemmy.ml
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
go to feed...
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).
save