So, as any self-respecting datahoarder and selfhoster, I have my server rack populated with a few machines, churning along as they tend to my hobby-related projects. Now that I’ve started using Lemmy I’m toying with the idea of selfhosting an instance, as I have both the hardware, bandwidth, and skillset for it.

So my question is: Are there any advantages to it? And other than time and resources, what are the downsides?

  • PriorProject@lemmy.world
    19·
    1 year ago

    The upsides are that you control your defederation list and you’re your own admin so you’re in control of whether your instance goes down and what it’s policies are.

    The downsides are:

    • Potential privacy leaks. Your all feed is public. If its full of creepy shit and you’re the only person in your instance, it’s there cause you subscribe to creepy shit.
    • You’re in control of whether your instance stays up. Security vulnerability gets mass exploited? Your problem.
    • Potential hosting liability. Your instance mirrors what you sub and serves it to the public unauthenticated internet. If you subscribe of stuff that’s questionably legal in your jurisdiction, that liability can become yours unless you’re familiar enough with your laws to know how to protect yourself.
    • All the standard self-hosting stuff like cost and hassle.
    • 001100 010010@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      111·
      1 year ago

      “Nice to see you’ve hosted your instance. Quick question: Why is your instance filled with hentai that that features underaged characters?”

    • red@feddit.de
      5·
      1 year ago

      Potential privacy leaks. Your all feed is public. If its full of creepy shit and you’re the only person in your instance, it’s there cause you subscribe to creepy shit.

      That’s why you always invite a few victims friends, so you can throw someone under the bus if need be.

    • ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      1 year ago

      An option to remove unauthenticated access to the main feed would be a great fix for the first issue, and probably would be desirable on single user/invite only instances where the admins don’t want random people taking up server resources with the web interface

      • PriorProject@lemmy.world
        11·
        1 year ago

        This isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s also important to understand single-user and tiny invite-only instances as analogous to “leechers” in the torrenting world. The federation load that an instance instance imposed on other instances depends much more on the number of communities it subscribes to than the number of active users. If a user stops using Lemmy but leaves their instance up, it’s generating federation load for no reason.

        Tiny instances are inefficient, and while it is desirable for the network to be able to scale to the point where it can reasonably support lots of them anyway, right now federation queues are backed up and messages are frequently getting dropped. Encouraging lots MORE tiny instances is probably not the efficient thing right this second. Rather, we’d want more users joining mid-sized instances that are not overloaded locally and that are making efficient use of the federation load they generate by using it to serve 100-1000 users rather than 1 or 2.