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'm very new here and curious if I could ask as it sounds like you know what you are talking about.

My self hosting skills are extremely basic. I have an 8G Pi4 I run jellyfin, navidrome and a few other bits and bobs on. I'm scared of opening ports on my home network so use Timescale for external access. Could I run a personal Lemmy instance like this? Can I interact with other instances via Tailscale or do I need to actually open ports?

Resource wise what would a personal instance require in the cloud? Would something basic like a 512mb 10G droplet from Digital Ocean suffice?

You could use a Cloudflare tunnel if you really wanted to avoid opening ports, but basically as long as you only open the right ports for what you want to host and have a good firewall (I use OPNSense) you're fine

You do need to allow incoming traffic, as the data is pushed to you by the remote server, not pulled from it.

As @Hexarei@programming.dev said you could however use Cloudflare tunnels and it would work just fine, it just needs HTTPS.

Experiment with it, have fun! Solving problems is how you learn that stuff 😃

Otherwise yeah the 512MB droplet should be alright to start off, that's about what my instance uses.