I think it's a matter of personal preference.

I've been running my own Mastodon instance for several months now, and I've enjoyed it. I don't have to rely on someone else, either, which is nice. I'm in control of everything on that instance.

As for Lemmy, I just started my own instance today, and am currently writing you from it. What made me decide to setup my own instance was some performance issues I was seeing with Lemmy.world, although that might have been an UI problem. Anyway, I enjoy doing this stuff, so I'm running my own instance for the sake of doing it.

On the flip side, it's more expensive and time consuming, and I'm the one who has to worry about backing up data, etc. Like I said, though, I enjoy doing it, so it's no big deal.

Following this attack, Linus Torvalds will switch to Windows.

ROFL

Sure.

I run my own instance at a cloud provider, and thus have monthly expenses I wouldn't normally incur, if I were using a public instance.

Color me shocked it wasn’t an all white/male/christian town council.

I'm sure those folks were OK with it, too.

It’s something that Linux users have been saying for 20 years and it’s outdated. It makes sense when maybe your computer came with less than a GB of RAM, but these days I usually configure a server with a small amount of swap (like a couple of GB), and I set swappiness to something very low like 5.

You're talking about Lemmy, right?

I provisioned an Ubuntu 22.02 server at Linode. I chose their 2 GB Shared CPU instance type. Once I configured the server to my liking, I ran through the Lemmy-Ansible instructions. (They have other methods, so check the documentation.)

Essentially, you install Ansible on your workstation. I'm on macOS and installed it via Homebrew. You then download their git repository, create the necessary configuration files, and then have Ansible configure the server. It was fairly simple.

It would probably be helpful if others knew what platforms you preferred to use. 🙂

If you're in Apple's ecosystem, I'm personally fond of Reeder.

What might make you want to ditch your self-hosted Mastodon instance?

With Lemmy, I didn't feel a need to pick any specific instance because I can follow communities from anywhere, and it seems to work pretty well.

One downside I've encountered with my own Lemmy instance is that post and comment history in the communities I follow begins when I started following them on my new instance. New posts and comments are federated my way, going forward, but I don't have the ability to go back and view as much history as one would on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, for example.

Sendgrid has a free plan, I know, but I believe you're limited on the number of emails you can send per day.

I’ve been using Logseq at work and I LOOOOVE it.

Yes, there is electricity.

I think Internet connectivity could also be an issue, unless you have an ISP that's friendly to you running a publicly accessible server on your Internet connection at home.

That's awesome! Running my own social media instances has become a hobby for me.

Having my own Lemmy instance has felt fairly seamless versus using Lemmy.world, but there have been some kinks. For example, when attempting to subscribe to a new community, the server has to pull a bunch of data first. This takes several seconds, but the UI simply says "not found" -- and then after several seconds, the UI updates with the community you want to follow. I figured this out by tailing the logs.

Also, the installation was pretty damn easy, especially when compared to Mastodon.

In the Mastodon web interface, you can take the URL of the Lemmy community and paste it into the search bar. After you press Enter, the community should show up, and you can follow it.

Another way to reference the community is using @ notation. For this community, you'd use @technology@beehaw.org in Mastodon.

I use Ivory to access my Mastodon account, and I've found that it doesn't recognize URLs from Lemmy at all. So, the @ notation works best there. Regardless, the Mastodon web interface handles it all properly.

Depends on the context, I think. For me, I rarely do it for personal stuff. If I wanted to be perfect, I could do it, assuming a signature is available to verify, but I'm lazy. I would venture to say most folks don't do it either.

With that being said, where I have been consistent about doing it has been writing config management code at work. If I need to have it download an installer from an untrusted source, I can verify that I'm installing the same package on all servers by verifying the signature before installation. This doesn't always work well in all circumstances, though.

I'm using Linode, and their prices are publicly available.

https://www.linode.com/pricing/

For Mastodon, I'm using the Linode 4 GB while the Lemmy server runs on the Linode 2 GB option. Both are under the Shared CPU pricing -- not dedicated.

You probably would be, but that depends on the law where the server is hosted. This isn’t a good place for legal advice like that.

What kind of server do you want to host?

LOL

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

Now if you do host for yourself then you can federate with other instances to subscribe and pull from their communities which does reduce the total load on those services but that is about it.

That is the main thing I'm doing, personally.

Communities are going to Win/Loose based on personalities and critical mass, and the people hosting those communities will just have to increase their hosting needs.

Speaking of hosting, I got to thinking what might happen when a community needs to move to another server. I wonder if some day we'll see a solution similar to Mastodon's where users can move their accounts and/or entire communities between Lemmy instances.

I didn't have this problem with Mastodon, but totally had it with Pixelfed. I don't think Pixelfed, at least at that time, supported relays. I scraped around pixelfed.social to find people to follow because I had an account there. It didn't seem possible at the time to see profiles on public servers, without having an account, so it was hard finding people. It was something I was used to do doing on Mastodon. In the end, I didn't have a positive experience running my own Pixelfed instance, and just decided to use pixelfed.social.

I do follow the developer and he's been making a lot of great progress. I've got the mobile app, and it's quite decent.

I've wondered that myself, and I don't know, to be honest, but there are some issues you'd certainly encounter. For example, if you posted any media it would need to be somewhere "always on" or remote instances and users might not be able to see it unless they managed to cache it on time. It means that your posts URLs wouldn't be accessible, and would only be available on servers to which it has already federated. There may be other issues, too, such as queues only keeping undelivered messages for so long, etc.

I'm sure someone with a good understanding of ActivityPub could explain whether or not this is possible.

I've had lot of issues with lemmy.ml. I just unsubscribed from everything over there since zero comments were federating over to my instance.

For personal Linux servers, I tend to run Debian or Ubuntu, with a pretty simple "base" setup that I just run through manually in my head.

• Setup my personal account.
• Upload my SSH keys.
• Configure the hostname (usually after something in Star Trek 🖖).
• Configure the /etc/hotss file.
• Make sure it is fully patched.
• Setup ZeroTier.
• Setup Telegraf to ship some metrics.
• Reboot.

I don't automate any of this because I don't see a whole of point in doing it.

I've not personally noticed any federation issues with Beehaw on my instance. Glad to hear things are better tonight.

No.

I know, for fact, that's delicious. Mmmmmmm.

It’s a timeline approach. So, I just enter notes for each day. I’ve developed a habit of just putting things down when I need, including random stuff, links to Slack conversations, etc. I then use tags to bind things together, and there are a couple of plugins in use.

I can't imagine it'd work without a domain, as your instance will need to talk HTTPS with other instances.

Thanks, I believe you are correct.

Sure, one could do that, but I prefer to keep things separate.

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.

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.

It's hard to say. I don't know if the admins of Lemmy.ml have been public about their issues or not. I know that Lemmy.world hasn't been having the same issues, at least from my perspective. Makes me think it's less an architectural or design problem, but rather a lack of server resources like CPU, as you suggested.

I do wish you could federate/sync specific communities to your instance to make searching/subscribing easier.

You mean something that populates your server with a history of posts and comments to communities before your subscribe to them?

Good luck getting the server connecting to you to trust it!

As far as I know, Lemmy doesn't have a way of following anyone else on the Fediverse, but you can certainly follow Lemmy users from Mastodon.

Looks yummy! I hope you enjoyed eating it.

Looks delicious! I wish I could try one.

What exactly does it mean to be Usenet-like, in terms of a Fediverse experience?

Since AP servers both accept incoming connections and make outgoing connections, both sides need valid certificates to do HTTPS.

Sure, it would keep the origin from being publicly accessible on the Internet, but you would want to put that server on its own network, anyway.