Why do people host Lemmy instances and how do they pay for them?

flashgnash@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 280 points –
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I just finished setting up this instance yesterday. I also self host a few other things. Self hosting is fun for me, but probably not most people. I honestly don't know what I'm doing but I'm doing it and it's working lol

I also really enjoy knowing I literally own all my own data. It's stored locally on my personal server. As for cost, I'm just using a mini PC someone in my family gifted to me. It's got some hardware limitations but that's more in theory than practice, but that's because it's only me and a few others who use the server so load is really low.

Hey I was trying to reply to you yesterday about looking into lemmy.hjson, but the send button wasn't working for some reason in jerboa. Is all working now?

I also really enjoy knowing I literally own all my own data. It’s stored locally on my personal server.

As far as I understand the fediverse, that's not necessarily the case. Let's take a local community with a post or comment of yours as an example, and see how it could go wrong.

When users from other instances subscribe, the community is copied to their instance, including your content. If federation is broken, or any of the two instances go offline, you can still change or delete your local data, but not the remote copy.