this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
218 points (97.4% liked)

Selfhosted

40040 readers
865 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What might make you want to ditch your self-hosted Mastodon instance?

With Lemmy, I didn't feel a need to pick any specific instance because I can follow communities from anywhere, and it seems to work pretty well.

One downside I've encountered with my own Lemmy instance is that post and comment history in the communities I follow begins when I started following them on my new instance. New posts and comments are federated my way, going forward, but I don't have the ability to go back and view as much history as one would on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, for example.

[–] ChaosAD@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have experienced the same with mastodon and pixelfed.

[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't have this problem with Mastodon, but totally had it with Pixelfed. I don't think Pixelfed, at least at that time, supported relays. I scraped around pixelfed.social to find people to follow because I had an account there. It didn't seem possible at the time to see profiles on public servers, without having an account, so it was hard finding people. It was something I was used to do doing on Mastodon. In the end, I didn't have a positive experience running my own Pixelfed instance, and just decided to use pixelfed.social.

I do follow the developer and he's been making a lot of great progress. I've got the mobile app, and it's quite decent.

[–] ChaosAD@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I really like Pixelfed too, the developer is very nice and very responsive.

[–] drlecompte@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically just the hastle of maintaining and hosting it. My ideal situation would be an instance with a few people, where we can share some of the burden, and perhaps cost. But maybe that has its own headaches when there is a falling out etc.

There are also other drawbacks with your own Mastodon instance in terms of discovering new people, as a lot of those tools are geared towards the server scope, and Mastodon prohibits a full index search.

I actually don't know what the Lemmy policy is on indexing, but a way to search the entire Fediverse (or at least large parts of it) would help tremendously in popularizing it, I think. I understand why indexing would be blocked, but that seems a lot like security by obscurity to me, which I don't think works very well.

[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Basically just the hastle of maintaining and hosting it. My ideal situation would be an instance with a few people, where we can share some of the burden, and perhaps cost. But maybe that has its own headaches when there is a falling out etc.

All very good points. I wouldn't mind sharing the costs and burden with some folks, but I'm pretty happy just maintaining it myself. Again, for me, it's something I enjoy doing.

There are also other drawbacks with your own Mastodon instance in terms of discovering new people, as a lot of those tools are geared towards the server scope, and Mastodon prohibits a full index search.

I never really had that problem, but then I started out on other Mastodon instances and just migrated my account around until I ended up on my own personal instance. I also participate in several relays, which helps a lot. In the end, I've also spent time looking at the public feeds on other servers and browsing their profiles to find people. Another thing I did was participate in conversations, which was a good way to get mutual followers.

With that being said, I don't follow a ton of people either. I read my entire timeline, chronologically, so I keep it pretty tailored. I disable boosts and mute/unfollow people often.

I actually don’t know what the Lemmy policy is on indexing, but a way to search the entire Fediverse (or at least large parts of it) would help tremendously in popularizing it, I think. I understand why indexing would be blocked, but that seems a lot like security by obscurity to me, which I don’t think works very well.

Lemmy indexes everything on the server, as far as I know, which means you should be able to find local content and content federated to the instance.