Hello, with the spicy beehaw drama I was wondering, would it be possible to selfhost a lemmy instance literally just for yourself and no one else to like, circumvent any defederation shenanigans? As all instances federate per default, this should work right?
Allthough, as far as my understanding of how federation works is that I would need to manually subscribe to every community on every instance that I’m interested in as federation only syncs communities that have at least one subscriber on the hosting instance, correct?
Or is there a way to subscribe to EVERYTHING?
Other than that is there any obvious downside to doing that?
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.
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).It’s not really all that difficult to spin up your own “server”. Sure, desktop hardware isn’t exactly targeted towards running a web server, but for a purpose like your own Lemmy/federation, I’d imagine just about any old hardware from the last 5 years or so oughta be fine.
Not sure what specs are needed for a kbin instance, but pretty much anything running an x64 processor and a reasonable amount of ram should work, even if it’s really old.
I think the biggest issue you might have is storage since as far as I understand everything you subscribe to is pushed and saved to your server, at least for a period
To me, the desktop hardware note sounds like you want to host the instance at home. In that case you need a suitable router, a static IP address or a DNS service, besides your own domain.
So, if I already have a server in my house, I could theoretically spin up a Lemmy or kbin instance solely for myself?
In that case you need a suitable router, a static IP address or a DNS service, besides your own domain.
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.
What’s happened to beehaw?
Defederation of a couple of servers. Think one was lemmy.world
Lol that’s a big yikes. Glad I never managed to make an account over at beehaw.
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.
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.
That’s any interesting idea. Curious to see if it would work.
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.
Just curious, which beehaw drama?
Edit: ah, scrolled down a bit and found this, assume that’s it.
They defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Beehaw is defederating from sh.itjustwor.ks and Lemmy.ml. Personally I think it’s silly to be upset over it considering defederation is one of the selling points of Lemmy.
Beehaw is just going for a more curated experience which I think is completely fine. I’m sure once they have more moderators they’ll consider refederating anyway.
