terribleplan

I run my own for myself and some friends who don’t really use it. If you are interested in doing so I say give it a shot.

So, hear me out… What if we put a scheme in place where anyone who wanted to use the API had to pay for access? And then we charge like 20x what we should to put them out of business. I am sure that would work out well.

Yep, nobody is talking about it at all…

• https://prime8s.xyz/post/3812
• https://lemmy.ml/post/1409164
• https://lemmy.one/post/337062
• https://lemmy.world/post/1079916
• https://lemmy.world/post/1060627
• https://lemmy.one/post/629353

1. Up to you, I would just avoid big instances like .world or .ml. People do congregate on big instances in most of the fediverse, so IDK that “professional” enters into it. It’s not as if you’re running a law firm on a @hotmail email address. I like hosting stuff for myself, so I am running my own instance.
2. For yourself you could get away with spending around $5-$10/mo, plus ~$10/yr for the domain name. More users/load would need more resources, .world is spending >$150/mo for the server(s) alone, and that will only grow as the instance grows.
3. Big thing would be site-wide moderation and managing federation. Dealing with reports, illegal content, communities that break server rules, users that are harassing others, etc. If you slack too much on that (or have overly lax policies) you may end up defederated by instances. Making the decision to defederate other instances. Etc.
4. Entirely gone.
5. Mostly just changes what you’d see on local. Federation can be wonky/slow at times, but that is true of federation between big instances as well, it’s just something you have to get used to when using Lemmy.

I mean, lots of providers have free trials (including some of the ones I mentioned), that 4Cx24G instance will cost like $100/mo (which is pretty competitive TBF) and you get a $300 credit for signing up… Oracle’s actual free tier is 2 VMs with 1/8Cx1GB each (which is pretty neat).

Also, I would just never consider Oracle for cloud hosting or anything else, because fuck Oracle. They’re worse than IBM. Larry Ellison is a lawnmower.

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. You can do it quite cheaply. It is feasible to run on a ~$5/mo VPS (Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean, Scaleway, etc) if you are willing to suffer potential downtime if things go wrong on that one machine. Eventually you might run out of image storage, but that can offloaded to any object storage provider such as those offered by the cloud hosts I listed or ones run by e.g. AWS (S3), Wasabi, Cloudflare (R2), etc.
4. If you know nothing about servers, linux, docker, postgres, reverse proxies, netwroking, http, etc. then it may not be worth it to you. I like the idea of having complete control over what servers I federate with. I like the idea of having a built-in archive of everything I read and write on Lemmy. Running an instance is of minimal cost to me because I already run software (including postgres, the database Lemmy uses as well as my own email server) for myself so it is low impact to add just one more service. Ultimately there are so many variables that you have to decide it for yourself.

If you want some general advice on how to set things up or certain things you need to make sure are done right so your instance works feel free to reach out. If you want to check out a smaller instance (I am the only regular user, but have a few friends that use my instance from time to time) feel free to sign up for mine to see what it might be like.

Exactly, your instance stores what you post (local) on it and what gets federated to it (cache, basically). You search those local and cached things. To do it some other way would basically man that either all instances somehow discover each other and send everything to each other all the time or your instance somehow discovers and searches all other instances when you do a search.

There has been talk about something that should make things better as far as “couldnt_find_community” more or less auto-searching a remote community when you go to a /c/community@example.com sort of link so the experience is less jarring and doesn’t require you to know you have to do a search.

Pretty much, yeah. This is why external discovery tools (like browse.feddit.de and others) are so important and useful. Also posing to any of the new community or community announcement/discovery meta communities. Also sidebars linking to other related communities like on that other site.

Users on those instances need to search for your community then subscribe, only will then new posts/votes/comments show up. Federation is opt-in, not automatic.

Yeah, they should really consider not accepting new users until that is figured out, honestly. There are plenty of servers out there that people can join at this point. Too much centralization in a decentralized system for my liking regardless of instance scaling.