this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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If instances get stricter about federation, I really hope small instances are still allowed to federate with the large ones. For example, I'm running my own Lemmy server just for me, and had no trouble federating. That's what I really like about the fediverse - my little server is essentially treated no differently to the massive ones. That's really the point of the fediverse.
It's very unlikely that big instances will start blocking small ones. It can certainly happen, but I think most people running Lemmy instances are more likely to want to federate. If they don't they'll probably run one of the forks that explicitly disable it, so you'll never know that they exist from your instance.
The possible problem with that is someone will eventually write a script that starts up new instances and then runs spambots on them. It's what happened with email. I think you can still self-host an email server, though, it's just a matter of running it well and communicating with the people that run blacklists if you get on one.
Spammers wouldn't even have to run Lemmy to spam, as they could have a spamming script that uses ActivityPub directly. I really hope that doesn't become widespread...
What’s it like running your own instance for yourself? Do you need to have a server running and a bunch of storage space?
It's working well! I already had a VPS that was only running Mastodon and had plenty of spare capacity, so I just installed Lemmy on the same server.
One of the hosts I use (GreenCloudVPS) was having a 9th birthday sale where they were offering a VPS with 9 cores (old Intel Xeon E5 though), 9GB RAM, 99GB NVMe disk space for $99 every three years ($33/year). It wasn't doing much until I installed Mastodon on it.
I'm interested in spinning one up as well, mostly for having the choice of what to name the domain lmao. Right now I gotta look more into it. Hopefully @dan can get back to us with some numbers.
I think as long as you don't give them reason to, they won't have any reason to block you. They'd have to explicitly block you, after all. If they aren't noticing any problems then I don't see why they'd take the time to block you.
So basically, you should be fine.
I'm also planning on hosting my own Lemmy instance at some point too.
What I'm concerned about is if the large instances move from a blocklist model (like they have now) to instead use an allowlist model, where only explicitly approved instances are allowed to federate with them.
That's true, that's a good point. Well I guess the only thing you can do is hope that doesn't happen lol
Setting up a Lemmy instance isn't the easiest thing, and automating it is even more challenging, so I don't necessarily think it's the kind of thing that can be done so easily. It's like 100x harder than creating a new account so I feel like It's not something that would be abused as much as like creating new accounts would be. I think it'll probably be fine.