Are there benefits to hosting your own personal lemmy?

RedirectedPotato@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 4 points –

Slowly exploring the lemmy ecosystem, since I don't want to use reddit, and was wondering if selfhosting would be a good idea?

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There are two big benefits in my opinion.

  1. Speed and responsiveness. When the bigger instances were (or are) overloaded, my Lemmy experience was still fast and snappy. Content was slower to update for those big instances, but navigating Lemmy itself was still fine, and it gave me an opportunity to engage with some smaller communities.

  2. Control of federation. I decide who to federate with, and as long as I follow other instance and community rules, I won't get defederated.

The biggest downside is that I can't discover new communities organically since I'm the only real active user of my instance. Nothing new gets federated unless I seek it out. But I solve that by using a fediverse indexer every week or so to search for popular or interesting communities.

But I solve that by using a fediverse indexer every week or so to search for popular or interesting communities.

Is there a way to automatically federate with other instances? Because I started my own Lemmy instance, and its annoying having to manually go to every community in order to federate with it. (The instance is for my own personal use, so I won't be opening registrations)

Absolutely, there are two tools I use to do so.

  1. Lemmy Community Seeder - Very customizable tool that by default grabs the top 50 posts in the top 50 communities of the specified instances every few hours.

  2. Lemmony - Less customizable tool that by default grabs pretty much everything. Probably less ideal for larger or more active instances, but my instance has 5 or 6 users, only a couple of which are active, so this tool has been awesome for populating my "All" feed.

I recommend creating a non-admin bot account and using that for these tools.

Badass thanks for this. I've enjoyed kinda keeping my instance more catered but starting to want to at least have more available and just subscribe to the stuff I want to see regularly.