this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

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[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As someone who likes having control over their data and especially backups, and someone who normally enjoys self-hosting things, I honestly might do it. I'm not sure if I'd want to host a lemmy instance or kbin instance though, since I know they all federate together anyway. I may also end up waiting until the software is more mature too before looking into it.

[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's awesome! Running my own social media instances has become a hobby for me.

Having my own Lemmy instance has felt fairly seamless versus using Lemmy.world, but there have been some kinks. For example, when attempting to subscribe to a new community, the server has to pull a bunch of data first. This takes several seconds, but the UI simply says "not found" -- and then after several seconds, the UI updates with the community you want to follow. I figured this out by tailing the logs.

Also, the installation was pretty damn easy, especially when compared to Mastodon.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'd maybe be interested in trying out self-hosting Mastodon at some point too, good to hear that Lemmy was easy to install though. I'm not too worried since I have quite a bit of Linux experience, I figure it probably won't be too bad to setup whatever social media instances I'm interested in checking out.

[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, if you've got a decent amount of Linux experience, I don't think you'll have any issues. Mastodon's installation is well-documented and works. My only criticism is that it's a bit long and you have to be careful not to miss anything.

On the other hand, I recall installing Pixelfed back several months ago and having a difficult time. The documentation was lacking, and it required me to use Arch Linux, which I had never used. I was able to get it working, but eventually terminated the instance after a while because I was never using it.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oof, yeah, requiring someone to use Arch definitely seems like a steep requirement lol

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

LOL

It wasn't bad -- I just wasn't familiar with it.

[–] azura@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait. I'm looking at the Pixelfed installation guide right now and it doesn't tell me to use Arch at all? Isn't it just a PHP app?

[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's awesome. This was several months ago when there was a link to some specific Arch Linux documentation that @dansup@mastodon.social mentioned was the most complete. Sounds like it's been cleaned up.

Yeah, I think it is a PHP app.

[–] azura@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

mm. Might have been a getting started from the ground up kind of setup guide and the author might be most familiar with that. But happily it seems like there's docker files in the main repo, including docker compose files, so that should make it quite easy to set up.

[–] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yea, but then they can say "I use arch btw". That's what really matters in life.

[–] jcg@halubilo.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally, I went with Lemmy because it seems to be quite a bit further along in it's development. It also doesn't look like kbin's developer is recruiting much outside help, if you look at the repos of the two projects on GitHub/Codeberg, Lemmy has tons of contributions from people while kbin is mostly just the one guy with a few commits here and there. Not to mention that Lemmy's way less of a resource hog because it's written in Rust whereas kbin is implemented in PHP. Also, as far as I know federation is still currently broken on kbin.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The reason why I'd consider kbin is because I almost think I might prefer the interface, also I'm more of a PHP developer myself so that is tempting in and of itself too lol

I may wait a little bit before trying out either one tbh and maybe I'll give both of them a try.