Selfhosted
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.
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You can set your instance to private and close registrations, which is what I am doing. That way you can use it only for yourself and a few friends and still be connected to the fediverse. The communities that you make on your self-hosted instance wouldn't be connected, though.
What's the benefit of doing this apart from a technical challenge and fun? Such a server wouldn't support the network in any way, right?
Well, as you mentioned before it's to enjoy the "technical aspect", which could be many reasons. For one, if the instance you signed up on shuts down there goes your account with it. I feel better self-hosting because I am in control of when/if it shuts down.
I’ve actually been playing with this idea myself! Is it hard to set up/manage?
It was super easy. I just edited the config file in the Ansible playbook and needed to edit the certbot task because I use Cloudflare but other than that it was a breeze.
One of the devs mentioned that the biggest draw on server resources is the direct web interaction, and loading pages, not the behind-the-scenes federation, where the database queries are simpler and the actions can be queued up and retried as needed. (I think apps would have the same issue since the server's going to be doing the same kind of massive database queries to build your feed.)
If your comment takes a few minutes to get from your home server to another one when the site's overloaded, it's not a huge deal, but if your comment takes a few minutes to get from your browser to your server, the site's basically down.
So moving yourself to a new server takes over the entire real-time load you would have been using, and the additional background load of sending threads to/from your server is a lot smaller.
As far as I understand, at least the Text Data (posts?) is replicated to your instance. So if you are only 1 person using your own instance, I think it should neither hurt not help the network. But if there are 2 or more people using your instance (Family / Friends) and they are interested in some of the same content, they will fetch that content from your server and not from the original servers (minus the pictures AFAIK). So it causes a bit less stress on the server that hosts the content your users are consuming.
I am all new to this, so take this with a grain of salt.
At the very least (and a sizable concern) is that any images you upload would at least be stored on your server. At least I think. Also self hosting...
If I set up my private instance for the purpose of interacting with other, popular, servers, can I save my comments locally? I'm referring to comments I make on another host, such as lemmy.ml I'm trying to understand if there is a way to keep my content in the event that the other server disappears.
I believe all comments on all communities you interact with are saved locally.
I just double-checked and logged into the psql docker container and yeah, your stuff is safely stored as well as all of the other content that is synced up. So, if you sync with gaming@beehaw.org all of the stuff you see on the front-end will also be stored in your local database, including your own content of course. I do not think this includes images that were not uploaded on your instance.
Edit: now I'm not sure about the images, I checked the images folder and it's almost 1 gigabyte. I've uploaded 0 images. Not sure if it's a cache or if they stay there forever.