Slowly exploring the lemmy ecosystem, since I don’t want to use reddit, and was wondering if selfhosting would be a good idea?
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Do you mean hosting a server just for your own personal use? Technical knowhow aside there are pros and cons.
Pros:
- You’re very unlikely to get defederated from anywhere and can control exactly who you defederate from
- You’re not at the whim of your server owner suddenly deciding to shut down one day
- You can decide whether or not to host communities on your server, in which case you’ll have control over exactly which ones get to be hosted there
Cons:
- You’ll need to search harder for communities to build up your subscription feed because you won’t have other users searching and indexing new things all the time, so you’ll be fairly reliant on sites like lemmyverse.net at least at first.
- Anecdotally I’ve heard that once you’ve got some bigger communities federated with your own, the database storage requirements can be surprisingly big. That’s just from off-hand comments from other admins though, I don’t know enough to comment or have any hard numbers on it.
@thegiddystitcher @RedirectedPotato
Another con: You become an admin/moderator and have to keep up to date with the latest bad servers to defederate from and you’ll have to deal with all kind of bad posts yourself instead of relying on a moderation team.
There are two big benefits in my opinion.
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Speed and responsiveness. When the bigger instances were (or are) overloaded, my Lemmy experience was still fast and snappy. Content was slower to update for those big instances, but navigating Lemmy itself was still fine, and it gave me an opportunity to engage with some smaller communities.
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Control of federation. I decide who to federate with, and as long as I follow other instance and community rules, I won’t get defederated.
The biggest downside is that I can’t discover new communities organically since I’m the only real active user of my instance. Nothing new gets federated unless I seek it out. But I solve that by using a fediverse indexer every week or so to search for popular or interesting communities.
But I solve that by using a fediverse indexer every week or so to search for popular or interesting communities.
Is there a way to automatically federate with other instances? Because I started my own Lemmy instance, and its annoying having to manually go to every community in order to federate with it. (The instance is for my own personal use, so I won’t be opening registrations)
Absolutely, there are two tools I use to do so.
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Lemmy Community Seeder - Very customizable tool that by default grabs the top 50 posts in the top 50 communities of the specified instances every few hours.
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Lemmony - Less customizable tool that by default grabs pretty much everything. Probably less ideal for larger or more active instances, but my instance has 5 or 6 users, only a couple of which are active, so this tool has been awesome for populating my “All” feed.
I recommend creating a non-admin bot account and using that for these tools.
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- More private, if you’re overly conscious about your IP being tracker by instance host
- You own your data
- You can experiment with alpha releases
- You can customize everything. Default CSS, javascript, etc
- You can’t be censored (only defederated)
You can customize everything. Default CSS, javascript, etc
I use a browser extension to modify CSS client side
You can’t be censored (only defederated)
The law can censor you (although you could put a Lemmy instance on i2p)
Everything else you said is right
