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?

180

You are viewing a single comment

I'd maybe be interested in trying out self-hosting Mastodon at some point too, good to hear that Lemmy was easy to install though. I'm not too worried since I have quite a bit of Linux experience, I figure it probably won't be too bad to setup whatever social media instances I'm interested in checking out.

Yeah, if you've got a decent amount of Linux experience, I don't think you'll have any issues. Mastodon's installation is well-documented and works. My only criticism is that it's a bit long and you have to be careful not to miss anything.

On the other hand, I recall installing Pixelfed back several months ago and having a difficult time. The documentation was lacking, and it required me to use Arch Linux, which I had never used. I was able to get it working, but eventually terminated the instance after a while because I was never using it.

Oof, yeah, requiring someone to use Arch definitely seems like a steep requirement lol

LOL

It wasn't bad -- I just wasn't familiar with it.

Wait. I'm looking at the Pixelfed installation guide right now and it doesn't tell me to use Arch at all? Isn't it just a PHP app?

That's awesome. This was several months ago when there was a link to some specific Arch Linux documentation that @dansup@mastodon.social mentioned was the most complete. Sounds like it's been cleaned up.

Yeah, I think it is a PHP app.

mm. Might have been a getting started from the ground up kind of setup guide and the author might be most familiar with that. But happily it seems like there's docker files in the main repo, including docker compose files, so that should make it quite easy to set up.