Should I host my own instance if I don't intend to run a community?

AbsurdityAccelerator@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 176 points –

Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

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I did it. So far I've noticed a few things, for example you have to populate/federate the communities yourself, and it can take a long time. It took hours to retrieve and catch up all the lemmy.world posts. I expect it to be an ongoing thing. When you first connect to a community, it downloads the first 20 posts, but all the comments are empty.

The plus side though is it is very fast for me. And nobody can delete my profile.

Do the comments ever load reliably? For me that would be a dealbreaker...

You gotta remember, The blackout brought us refugees I don't think lemmy planned for this. I think the updates that are coming will address all of this. Reddit is decades old. Lemmy is new to all of us. We just gotta wait and eventually it will become second nature and we will be as good as Reddit

Oh totally. It wasn’t a knock at the software at all. In fact. I’m surprised by how well this works as a drop-in replacement for Reddit for me and both Lemmy and Kbin are solid.

The reason I asked was that, with my single-user Mastodon instance, likes/boosts and comments are nearly always incomplete on my server just because of the way federation works. I was just wondering if that was something smaller instances had to deal with in perpetuity or if it was just a one-off issue that happened at the start.

The OP commented below saying that comments appeared to be loading instantaneously after that initial hiccup.

As far as I can tell yes. Once the federation catches up the backlog, comments and posts seem to be near instantaneous.

I like running my own too, and agree it’s a bit of a chore to get content.

I feel the biggest hurdle is finding communities. I wish the instance would automatically index communities from federated instances. I don’t mean track posts/comments, just keep a record of the communities existence.

Looking them up elsewhere, then searching locally, waiting for it to work, then subscribing is a bit of work and I’ve only bothered with about 10 so far.