As far as I understand it currently people host their own Lemmy instances just for the hell of it or out of the goodness of their heart
But the larger instances will end up costing more money and I'm doubtful that will be sustainable with no income
Alot of the larger instances have user donations set up so that the servers can be maintained, this is how lemmy.world works
You can do your part! I set up a recurring donation recently, recurring donations are much better for the sustainment of an instance since the owner knows they can keep running and not have to worry about intermittent donations.
Larger instances will either have more donators or close their subscriptions if it really is unsustainable.
The more Lemmy grows, the more instances will show up, which will help spread the load.
You speak of sustainability but Lemmy survived the wave of incoming Redditors without much downtime. It's really impressive that this growth could happen. That's the power of decentralized systems: they scale!
Crazy-ish idea, but maybe Lemmy could make a feature where instances can have custom awards similar to Reddit gold and stuff, and users can buy them to both award posts they like and financially support the instance host
Users actually run a lot of larger instances on the Fediverse off of donations! I run a larger Mastodon server and we get literally double our monthly costs in donations. For every month we stay open, that is two months longer we stay open. Absolutely wild. We have about 1.5k users, with about 20-30 of them donating maybe $5-10 monthly. That's 2%-ish of the user base donating. Lemmy is LEAGUES easier to host given that it's written in Rust and is incredibly resource efficient. So I can only imagine it'll be even cheaper to host on donations.
Simple solution - charge all the various Lemmy apps API fees. Problem solved!
One other thing I don’t see people pointing out is that Lemmy is basically a successor to classic web forums, so companies may run their own so they can have full control over the experience and moderation like for movies, series’s, or games, and in which case they would be more than happy to eat the cost of hosting. For example there could be a Lemmy.Disney.com instance to act as a Disney sanctioned discussion zone for their products where they could put tons of moderation rules in place.
I really like the overall concept of Lemmy, so I decided to set up lemm.ee to support the Lemmy network with my skillset. I have previously had the privilege of being responsible for running large platforms online (end-to-end, everything from operations to software engineering), and so far, this experience seems to be extremely relevant for running Lemmy in its current state.
As for paying for hosting, my initial plan was to to just pay for everything myself as kind of a hobby, but the userbase at lemm.ee has been very gracious in first asking me several times to share costs, and then actually sending money once I set up donations. I'm not sure yet if this donations-based funding will be sustainable, or if it will fall off after the initial hype dies, but for now it's really awesome to see that there are several other people who believe in lemm.ee and want to share financial responsibility for it.
I've been hosting a gaming server plus other related stuff myself for some years now.
While the user base will definitely be different, relying solely on donations is unfortunately not sustainable long-term. Donations fluctuate massively based on time of year in my experience. So it's always good to periodically remind your community that lemm.ee needs donations to survive long-term.
When I do those reminders, users come out of the woods in droves to donate. It's less that they're unwilling to donate and more that they just forget to donate.
What does it actually cost? I have no basis for a ballpark guess even. I've seen this question asked to a number of admins and haven't seen a direct answer.
It's hard to judge how sustainable a donation based approach is without that info.
The costs will vary wildly depending on how the instance has been set up. If you set up all necessary services on a single VPS (as is the most common approach for smaller instances), then you can probably get by on $10-$20 a month. Splitting different services onto different servers, adding backups, load balancing, CDNs, redundancy, caches, etc will quickly increase the cost. Bigger instances need more powerful servers, that will increase the cost further.
On lemm.ee, we are currently not using very high-end servers, but we ARE using all the other things I mentioned above, and the monthly cost is currently hovering around $200 (that's for 3 servers, a managed database, object storage, load balancing, a global CDN, and an e-mail provider). This is still on the very cheap side in the grand scheme of running online platforms, but definitely much more than I would want to pay for a single-user instance for example.
That's great! It's kind of a crowdfunded instance, then. Makes me wonder if it would be feasible to implement some sort of collection box plugin or something...
Yes ... if anyone is a developer looking for ways to provide value to the fediverse ... I suspect the donation process is probably of high value.
I don't know the best way for it to be done ... but something so that it's easy for users to setup a single or regular donation and easy for devs and admins to put the relevant button right into their platform ... all so that whoever is willing to donate has every opportunity to do so.
Yes, and I know it's counter to the core motivations of this movement, but probably need a centralized repository for donation that can be a universal door for funds that can then be distributed to vulnerable, but active, instances. Needs to be run by a collective of reps from instances meeting a minimum threshold of support for the community. Also needs to be nimble enough to revoke funding is an instance takes a hard evil turn.
Or maybe just an app/site that recommends a distribution of a set monthly amount (e.g. 30 bucks) to the instances you use the most as a user?
I host my own. Specifically for myself and those who are friends or friends of friends.
I have a cluster of servers operating in my garage. Free real-estate for tons of stuff I want to host. I have to "pay" for electricity... the rest was already paid for long ago. My electricity cost for my whole cluster... is an estimated $1750 a year. But that cluster is 160 CPU cores, 750 GB of RAM, and ~400TB of storage. You ain't getting that on a cloud hosted provider for $145 a month. About $110 of that is subsidized by my business operations. I host email, websites, nextcloud, plex, etc... boatloads of stuff.
You offer paid hosting with hardware in your garage? I'm getting dot-com flashbacks!
I actually do... Yes... I have dual internet connections, dedicated power off both phases of my electricity with ~5 hours of battery backup, run redundant internal infrastructure (power, network, and server hardware)... I also have a massive backup library and am currently working on obtaining offsite backups solution. The whole site/house is also monitored with cameras.
I have better uptime than some datacenters in my area have which I can truthfully quantify that as I also hold a CIO/CISO position in another company that operates out of a major Datacenter in my area.
Edit: Should clarify, an offsite backup solution that ISN'T "just peer with backblaze or some other provider" to store your backups. I intend to do a rotating tape library. With one set of tapes always being off site.
Also to mention... I have better uptime than AWS-east at this point of the year... Although there will be some outages of my infrastructure here soon for a network hardware update. I suspect something in the order of about 1 minute of downtime total.
I was wondering what Gilfoyle was up to these days
forget Gilfoyle I wanna know what Anton is doing to Chat GPT
Now you just need solar or something feeding a battery to cover most of your electricity costs.
How does load balancing work across this fediverse.. if at all?
What kind of load balancing are you thinking about/looking for?
If we look at Lemmy in specific...
Jobs that a server performs for users on it's platform:
Login services(are you even you to begin with?)
Session Management (being logged in at multiple places, not mixing you up with other users...)
Subscriptions (what content to even show you... organizing them on the page... etc.)
Ban lists (and applying them to what you're looking at)
Peering with the other platformsJobs that a server performs for off platform users: Sending ActivityPub messages to the other user's platform.(effectively the same as "peering with other platforms" from above)
The idea is that the jobs that the server has to do for it's local users is actually a lot more both numerically and in taxing tasks than the jobs that one particular instance has to do to send updates to the federated instances... A lot of the list in the first case is a boatload of SQL queries. The activitypub notification is effectively a broadcast of a relatively simple text that doesn't take much bandwidth.
So let's look at actual cases now that we have some ideas of what instances are doing.
I run a small instance, I have a few users (because I purposefully keep it small). If my users only ever interact with the fediverse through my instance, then other instances don't have to do most of the jobs in the top list. I've taken that load from lemmy.ml or other bigger instances that my users would have ultimately migrated to if they didn't have my server. The tradeoff is that my few users now cost the 1 connection for activitypub notifications.
Lets look at a theoretical "perfect" setup... 2,000,000 users across let's say 1,000 instances. Evenly distributed. So each instance has 2,000 users. In that case, any given server would have to serve 2,000 people from the upper list and 999 activitypub broadcasts. This is significantly easier to do than have a single server try to handle all 2,000,000 users on a single instance serving nothing to the activitypub broadcasts.
There's is one caveat with this... activitypub broadcasts will send everything that is subscribed... even if users don't actually view it. So there could be some waste. This then leads to the discussion of well how many users until there's a breakeven in cost of the first list vs the potential waste of the activitypub bandwidth. That answer is debatable... But most people agree that take the discussion seriously that the return on investment could be as low as 2-5 users. I think that the bandwidth cost outweighs the SQL (CPU, RAM, etc...) costs quite handily personally.
Other useful functions that occurs with this setup... As long as I got the ActivityPub message on my server... my users can see all of Lemmy.ml's content. Regardless of if Lemmy.ml is actually running or not. We saw that with the downtime that some of the bigger servers are seeing, all the other instances could still consume the content... Just no updates were being sent.
This is relatively simplistic... I've skipped some nitty gritty stuff... I've simplified some other stuff. But this is the gist.
Edit: Other functions that you need to think about that lemmy is accomplishing for local instance users... Notifications, saved posts, language filtering, settings, profiles, avatars, reporting, slur filters, moderation, NSFW filters.. The top list is actually considerably larger... like I said we simplified.
I've just launched one:
Why?
- I get free hosting with my job
- I'm a FOSS enthusiast and want to contribute to the fediverse
We run ours, because we are two trans women that are fortunate enough to be able to afford to run an instance that specifically prioritises the needs of our community. It's a way of using our privilege to create safe community spaces
Fantastic. You go girls 🥰
I started !programming.dev because I am a moderator of several 100k+ subs over on Reddit and I didn't want my communities to not have a place to go if Reddit crashed and burned (even though it's incredibly unlikely). The main sub I moderated (/r/ExperiencedDevs) for years wanted user verification to combat the spam that was newbies commenting and posting about things they didn't really know or understand. This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn't really care about their communities.
I am also a strong supporter of pulling control away from megacorps. We need more small to medium sized businesses on the planet.
For selfish reasons? I wanted to work on something new and have true ownership over it, the ability to build a community that worked together to build something without capitalism standing in the way. It might seem strange, but one of the first things I did was bring multiple other people on board to help me maintain the server, even going so far as to add domain managers to the domain name. This was all to counter the major questions people were asking around "what if the host decides they don't want to host anymore?". Well hopefully the programming.dev community is willing to take that burden if the time ever comes, even though I hope it doesn't. I also wanted to start something similar to a coop, where ownership is shared, meaning users have incentives to make the platform better. I have lots of ideas around this, but this will never be possible on Reddit. It is quite feasible here.
I also had the chance to buy an incredibly dope domain name! https://programming.dev! Why wouldn't I jump at that chance? And I get to even use it instead of let it flounder. So many reasons to host something like this, to build a trusting community, a safe space to have to let people talk about a shared love/topic/hobby.
Totally agree with the dope domain name. Not going to lie, a big reason for picking
programming.devwas to be /u/[email protected]This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn’t really care about their communities.
Just curious how you think you might go about this. Do you plan on contributing yourself, forking, or using the community to influence the direction/prioritization of new features?
Honestly the domain name is a fantastic choice; Much easier to feel comfortable sharing links to my colleagues from programming.dev than something like "shit just works" or "lemmy world"
Why?
Seemed fun to do. Wanted to support something that gets people away from reddit.
How did I pay for it? I have a miniature datacenter in my house, complete with redundant power. Hosting lemmy is a drop in the bucket as far as my resources are concerned. As such, there really isn't a measured cost for it. The infrastructure was already there and running, and lemmy doesn't consume much of it.
I don't take donations.
I already host my own stuff for the most part: emails, DNS, NextCloud, IRC server, IRC client (ZNC, The Lounge), my website and a few other things.
I already pay like $50/mo for a dedicated server so that I have complete control over my data and my digital life, so adding a Lemmy instance to the mix is basically free. Just another VM among many of them, sharing the same resources as the rest of the stuff I host.
I share my server with a few friends, and pretty much my friends and their friends are all free to use my stuff as well. Been doing that for about 14 years at this point: always let my friends put their PHP sites on my server and whatnot. A dozen people using my IRC bouncers, a handful of people on my IRC server. When people need a game server sometimes I hand them out a VM to run the server for a while, then when they're bored I turn it off and shelve it away. It's a lot nicer to foot the cost of a service when it's for people you know and care about.
I'm a FullStack + DevOps engineer as my day job, so it's pretty trivial for me to set up and maintain. If anything it's a bit relaxing compared to the insanity I deal with at work.
Regarding costs, the nice thing with distributed systems like Lemmy is that the average small to medium sized instance is really cheap to run. It's when you run into scaling problems as you grow that becomes painful and often expensive if you can't optimize the system. Suddenly you need way more servers, redundant databases, caching layers, spend a lot of time maintaining all of that, write automation to scale up more easily, etc.
Without federation, the whole ecosystem would go down, it puts a lot of pressure and a lot of need in maintaining reliability and performance. With federation, if my node goes down for a day or two, only a handful of users will complain about it, and all is well.
So in a way, many smaller instances distributes the cost of running the whole fediverse across many more people with much lower cost figures each, something one can afford to pay continuously even without taking in any donations. As I said, it cost me $50 for the whole server, but really I could probably run this on Oracle's free tier forever and never pay a dime for my Lemmy experience.
I'm very new here and curious if I could ask as it sounds like you know what you are talking about.
My self hosting skills are extremely basic. I have an 8G Pi4 I run jellyfin, navidrome and a few other bits and bobs on. I'm scared of opening ports on my home network so use Timescale for external access. Could I run a personal Lemmy instance like this? Can I interact with other instances via Tailscale or do I need to actually open ports?
Resource wise what would a personal instance require in the cloud? Would something basic like a 512mb 10G droplet from Digital Ocean suffice?
You could use a Cloudflare tunnel if you really wanted to avoid opening ports, but basically as long as you only open the right ports for what you want to host and have a good firewall (I use OPNSense) you're fine
You do need to allow incoming traffic, as the data is pushed to you by the remote server, not pulled from it.
As @[email protected] said you could however use Cloudflare tunnels and it would work just fine, it just needs HTTPS.
Experiment with it, have fun! Solving problems is how you learn that stuff 😃
Otherwise yeah the 512MB droplet should be alright to start off, that's about what my instance uses.
To have some control over my data and for the fun of it. With money? Selfhosting to me is a hobby and it has also taught me a lot, some of which has been helpful on my career.
I've loved the idea behind Lemmy since I first discovered. At first, I was using lemmy.ml, but then I saw the opportunity to provide a nice space and expand my sysadmin skills. Since there was no Portuguese instance yet, I thought why not create one?
Since then, I've met more people hosting Portuguese services and it has been great :DFor funding, I'm working on two ways: the typical donations and trying to secure support from local FOSS organizations. At the moment, the server costs are not prohibitive and there have been some donations already. I've also been talking to some of those orgs and it's going well :)
I don't see why an instance couldn't go with ads and subs or awards the same way Reddit does.
Because they'd probably have to create that tech themselves. Not that they won't but it's not there ATM afaik
This sounds encouraging, I hope your instance flourishes
Thank you! :3
See this is good. The more the fediverse grows the more people find out what us old users have known for years and years:
You don't need to rely on large tech companies. The web is for everyone.
It is pretty wild to think about how many people only know the internet as about 5 websites or apps..
I hosted ad-free invision and phpbb forums for almost a decade before the centralized services started. I do it because I like social media and understand the value of a vibrant commons. I've been working with computers since I was a child so hosting yet-another-app-server is not really that big of a deal and gives my users and myself a place we can call home on the internet.
The out-of-pocket cost is minimal for a small instance, for larger instances scaling issues are going to hit eventually and costs will go beyond what 1-person will bear without complaint.
Highly recommend more smaller instances.
My server costs me only about $5 USD a month and I can host thousands of users without much additional effort (my sites before would usually run to ~10k users).
**Tl;dr we do this because we want to, the act itself is often fulfillment. **
I host my own because it's cheap, less than 10 dollars per month, and I wanted to contribute to the growth of the Lemmy community.
Also turns out that it's another benefit to this: I don't have to get involved in the entire political debate of who federated with who. I just subscribe to communities I want anywhere.
I decided to host my own because I was on lemmy.world and we got blocked by beehaw, which had many of the communities I wanted to be a part of. I run mine on a server that's in my house, so the only thing I'm paying for is electricity. And I have solar panels.
How difficult is it to host your own instance? Can you still use apps like Connect with it?
Yes to the last question
As long as you have a domain or IP address for the instance, the apps should be able to connect to it.
lol I was the same way. I went from not being able to see just beehaw to spotty federation with many other instances (oddly enough beehaw and the kbin instances are nearly perfect), so I'm not yet sure if it was an upgrade.
What's funny is I feel like my instance has spotty federation with lemmy.world, but everything else is pretty good. I wonder what's going on over there.
Clever
Here's one perspective: https://runyourown.social/
Personally, I run a Mastodon+Hometown server for around 100 people and it costs me about $30/mo. It costs me more to fill my car's gas tank. I could maybe start a patron or something, but at this stage, it is not even necessary.
About 3 years ago, I was a member of r/ChapoTrapHouse, which got banned from Reddit. The day after this happened, we had over 10,000 people sitting in a lifeboat Discord "server." Within the community, we had the experience and willpower to take Lemmy, kick the tires, make a couple adjustments which were necessary for our community, and make sure we weren't doing malpractice by hosting it. This all happened before Federation had been implemented in Lemmy.
Maintaining the fork was labor intensive, and a lot of the original developers burned out. We couldn't afford wages for development (the site still only exists due to volunteers), but the hosting costs were easily covered by user donations.
I never knew CTH got banned from Reddit, holy shit. Y'all out there doing the lord's work supporting your community like that. Seriously, hats off :)
We were too good at posting. It just wasn't sustainable.
That's weird, your username isn't displayed for me, just your profile pic
@flashgnash @PorkrollPosadist i was active in the chapo subreddit when it was murdered and have been a patreon supporter of dessalines ever since
@PorkrollPosadist @flashgnash Chapo, I still miss that.
For the uninitiated, they were closed because people would not stop posting photos of John Brown (1800-1859) after being warned that this wasn't acceptable. Such bullshit.
How is that unacceptable?
hexbear gang
i Have a homelab, i work and design computer/server/linux/security solutions for enterprises from my home. Lemmy is just another docker process in my lab.
This will also be the case for me eventually, once I get around to setting up a Lemmy instance it'll just be joining all the other stuff already in my lab k3s cluster
I host my own instance for the same reason I self-host the dozens of other services. To have control over my digital services the best I can. I have a few server machines running various services. I run like 40 docker containers running at the moment. Lemmy is a set of those containers.
It cost me the electricity cost to run the server, plus the cost of my internet. I suppose you should include the initial hardware cost- my servers are basically my old gaming rigs. Not to mention the time investment to maintain another service. For me, it's worth it to self-host if I can.
Specifically for lemmy, I seen how overloaded the various major lemmy instances out there were, so self hosting could mean one less user on those instances. I also didn't see any significant drawbacks to self-hosting the instance since I can still join and communicate with all the other communities.
I can see that, but I expect the main cost of servers are the hosting of subs, not maintaining users.
I expect that those servers are going to need support eventually.
I expect the main cost of servers are the hosting of subs, not maintaining users.
Which is easy to avoid, if you want. You can disallow the creation of communities on your instance.
So users can still join and make it their home, but they will have to subscribe to communities on other instances.
I'm not sure about the ethical implications. It means you're sort of leeching off moderation and maintenance from other admins.
I guess it's a negligible point and totally fine, but not sure. Would be interesting if community-admins could share their thoughts on this.
I tried out my own, one person instance, and I had a hard time getting comments to pull in. I would have to browse to the original instance to view all of the comments. Have you found a good way to overcome that?
I switched back to a more public instance just because I found the process of going out to view the content, back to my own instance if I wanted to comment, then back to the original again to keep reading the discussion very tedious.
Being on a more populated server seems to give most if not all of the comments directly.
When you first subscribe to a community it only pulls in the last 20 or so posts and I think a limited amount of comments, and then everything going forward. This seems to be a common point of confusion for a lot of instance admins.
Presumably this is to prevent a possible DDoS/performance failure vector as it would be trivial to setup a large swarm of instances on tiny VM's and then simultaneously start hitting massive communities from a single instance and requesting a large body of historical content.
Edit: Also when you first setup and start subscribing to a large number of instances, this initiates a LOT of communication and database writes. Lemmy still has some performance bottlenecks. Once everything is initially synced and settled it runs fine. I have a friend running their instance on a $5 Linode instance that only has 1vCPU and 1GB of RAM without any issues, and they're hosting users.
like many others, I hosted my own for a variety of reasons.
- I like to tinker
- this was a chance to do a lot of tinkering and get in on the "ground-floor" of something I think has a lot of potential
- it gives me a bit more control over the experience, which is helpful when trying to get friends/family to give Lemmy a chance.
As for the cost, I have several VPS's which cost ~$40/year, so the cost is basically negligible.
$3.33/month? I too would like to know who your VPS provider is.
Can I ask who your VPS provider is?
Need to know your provider.
I, too, am interested in knowing your provider.
I do because I want to control my data and it runs on a VPS that also serves as my email server, amongst other small things. I pay about $20 USD a month which is nothing to keep my data from grubby hands. Though I must admit it was a lot of work getting my mail server running smoothly and it requires some tlc every now and again.
Mind going into some details about what you're selfhosting overall?
What do you do on your instance? What data does your instance hold?
I am already hosting the AI Horde so I'm good with infrastructure. And since lemmy provided an ansible playbook which is my expertise, I thought it would be easy. And it was, even with my using my own loadbalancer solution instead of nginx.
I already had a server I wasn't using much for the AI Horde so I repurposed it. The DB physical I have is really good so I just made it share the DB for lemmy as well.
I pay for it from the same budget which runs on donations. I put a Kofi link on the sidebar and already covered so much of the costs that I sent some of the overflow to lemmy development
I sent some of the overflow to lemmy development
I was hoping for something like that the other day. Makes me happy to see it happening! Thank you :)
Word to the wise, Lemmy devs prefer liberapay over patreon and opencollective.
I am doing it because it is fun and it is a way to try to understand how things work. I am still not sure whether my answers successfully propagate to all servers.
I don't know about all servers, but I see you from vlemmy.net!
We hear you loud and clear over here at the outpost!
Can see your answer from here so all is good
I'm selfhosting my instance for fun and not for profit. I'm using a server on Hetzner that costs me 4.11/mo. I'm the only active user of my instance, but I like to own my own data and selfhost my own services.
My point is that sure while it's new and shiny everyone wants to try it out but I think over time people will get bored with self hosting lemmy and move onto other things. I might setup my own on a free tier VPS or something because that's a thing for some reason, let Amazon Microsoft or oracle pay for it lol
over time people will get bored with self hosting lemmy and move onto other things
I wouldn't worry about that. At the same time, new people join lemmy. Most as users, but some as admins, and even a few as developers. At the moment, I believe the increase in new servers is way more capacity than we need for new users.
Looking around this thread made me happy (thanks for creating it!). It seems many people host for very admirable reasons, sometimes explicitly unselfish. I am grateful for this and totally fine when one of those people decides to step down for whatever reasons. It's all part of the beauty of freedom.
From a user's point of view, one might worry that users could be forced to move when an instance shuts down. Happened to me. Not great, but a piece of cake compared to migrating from another platform.
For statistical reasons, we can probably assume that most users will end up in stable instances with very few to zero moves.
What spec did you go for?
I'm using cx11 currently which is plenty.
In the medium term I’m confident costs could be met using patreon or something similar for large instances.
Plenty of people willingly paid for reddit awards etc. I think most of us feel more loyalty to Lemmy than reddit in the light of recent events.
I have a 4 core 24 GB ARM VPS on that Oracle free tier that I use to self host some personal services.
I just think it's neat.
What's the catch? How long does the free tier last?
Oh shit really? You get that much processing power for free? I gotta sign up to that
Except that the instances are usually full. There is hope, but not much
Me too, works well!
is this a dedicated vm or something else?
I'm hosting my own because it's fun and it's cheap to do it. I imagine it could get expensive to host bigger instances, and at that point the admins would likely look to donations to keep things going.
I just finished setting up this instance yesterday. I also self host a few other things. Self hosting is fun for me, but probably not most people. I honestly don't know what I'm doing but I'm doing it and it's working lol
I also really enjoy knowing I literally own all my own data. It's stored locally on my personal server. As for cost, I'm just using a mini PC someone in my family gifted to me. It's got some hardware limitations but that's more in theory than practice, but that's because it's only me and a few others who use the server so load is really low.
Hey I was trying to reply to you yesterday about looking into lemmy.hjson, but the send button wasn't working for some reason in jerboa. Is all working now?
I also really enjoy knowing I literally own all my own data. It’s stored locally on my personal server.
As far as I understand the fediverse, that's not necessarily the case. Let's take a local community with a post or comment of yours as an example, and see how it could go wrong.
When users from other instances subscribe, the community is copied to their instance, including your content. If federation is broken, or any of the two instances go offline, you can still change or delete your local data, but not the remote copy.
Since devices that compute generate heat, it is a good way to hear your home up in the PNW. Additionally, you get to host websites. Everyone wins.
Better if you mine crypto, cuz any profit is just extra. You get the same results as if you were using a wall heater but you also get something in return.
Also (in theory) you can stick a VPN in front of it to hide your home IP to prevent DDoS attacks etc.
I love playing with computers. That's about it in general.
I've been using Hetzner to get dedicated hosts before and I have had two mediocre servers as a playground for some time now so why not add another service to the stack, arr-I mean yeah
I want my own space in the internet and I set aside money for it monthly from my paychecks
I saw the struggle on the main instance, and wanted to help.
I pay $12/month for a dedicated vps.
I asked another commenter here the same question that I'm going to ask you.
I was running a my own single user instance, but I had a hard time getting comments to come in to mine. Have you found a good way to get Lemmy to more reliably pull in comments from remote instances?
I would have to browse out to the original instance to see most of the comments, then back to my own if I wanted to comment (if it was under a comment that my instance hadn't pulled in, then too bad), then back out to the main site to continue reading. I found that process very tedious so I switch back to a more populated server which seems to pull in most if not all of the comments.
Run it on some free or cheap cloud instance https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
I setup my own instance so that I could have some control over my alias, and pretty much because I can.
You can go a long way with free cloud offerings from both Amazon and Oracle and setup a decent sized instance. I set mine up at a data-center where I manage unrelated services, but I take full advantage of Amazon & Oracle for side projects. DigitalOcean would be another low cost option, as you can run a small lemmy instance on a pretty modest droplet. You'll get the most horsepower from Oracle always free if you can manage to find one of their regions with available resources. (it can be a challenge)
I’m still hacking away on my attempt to establish an instance on a DigitalOcean droplet. I’m not a professional sys admin, just a linux hobbyist but this does seem like the easiest way to make a small instance withiut the extra overhead of home hosting.
My total cost should be under $8 a month until I get more than a handful of users, if that ever happens. My main goal really is just a bit more control than the R-place allows.
Mostly to test about how activitypub works, also paying out of pocket for $5 a month.
Well the bigger ones do take donations, and its working out fine.. you can see the same thing working on other fediverse platforms
I host my own to act as the sister of my Mastodon instance. It's hard to afford given I'm a student, but it pays off knowing I'm on my little node of the decentralized internet.
Because I don't want to be reliant on someone else's servers, plus I can set it up exactly how I want.
As for how I pay for the server, I use a free OCI VPS, so... I don't.
I tried to sign up to this, but it doesn't support my bank's "confirm purchase" thing, and it errored when I tried a virtual credit card..
Since a lot of you are here, are there any good communities for Lemmy admin discussion?
I know for sure that there's a Matrix community, which is where a good amount of discussion takes place.
I host my own instance mostly because I find it fun to do, and because it allows me to choose which communities and instance I federate with without having my account tied to the whims of somebody else.
i wish us users could afford such luxury of blocking certain instances on our own.
That would be very welcome indeed, I agree!
I think that functionality will eventually be added when the devs get around to it.
Allow a user to block an instance #2397
You can contribute, encourage others to contribute, post a bounty or leave a thumbs up, or wait.
Another option is to block communities, you can already do that on your own.
Yep. I want to federate and block who I want to federate and block. Large instance admins need to make compromises for practical reasons, but I don't. My personal instance has no boards, so I don't have to deal with problematic users from other instances either. If an instance is particularly awful, I can just not visit them until I have time to switch to my admin account and defederate it, there's no urgency.
Plus, I thought it would be easier to get my friends to switch if they had an admin they could literally call if they ran into problems.
I have a pretty unique domain name and don’t mind the $7 a month to run the instance on AWS. I’m not going to do a ton with it, but I would if there was interest.
I chose to host my own instance for my community because I wanted to be independent from any other instances' administration, federation decisions or any sorts of politics.
Right now I'm paying for it out of my own pocket, but I'm working towards setting up a donation flow.
I already owned my own home server that I built for running a file server and other random things. Currently all I’m paying for is $2.50/month for a proxy server on Google Cloud so I don’t have to expose my stuff directly to the internet.
How does that Google cloud proxy server work?
I host my own, and I already have servers for other reasons so there's effectively no extra cost because I can easily handle the load.
Hosting my own instance on my server just because I can. And I have resources.
If your ISP can give you publicly routed IP address - you can host it too, right from your home!
You should use cloudflare tunnel. Helps secure your server and doesn't matter if you don't have a static IP.
I shouldn't, but MAY.
Also I recommend not to use it because relying on fourth party things for accessibility isn't good. Imagine what would happen when cloudflare will "experience technical difficulties" (c)(r)(tm).
I don't host a lemmy instance yet, but I host other services and I do it mainly for fun. As far as I have read, a small scale lemmy instance runs very well on very low performance hardware, which means the cost of running it is probably less than 10 $ a month.
The big lemmy instances that need better hardware have patreons and other services where people can donate money.
It's cheap enough that I can pay for it, and I feel like it's a valuable service to provide.
I was thinking of doing it so certain communities from the other place would feel welcome, but someone is domain squatting what I was planning
It's not me is it?
Did you buy lemmy.scot and feddit.scot?
The "why" for me is "Why not?" - I wanted to give Lemmy a try, and I enjoy self hosting stuff! I also felt that opening an instance was the best way I could contribute, since my Rust skills are nowhere near good enough to work on Lemmy's backend and frontend was never my cup of tea.
As for how I pay for it, well regardless of whether I ended up running Lemmy or not I already rent two dedicated servers as a way of "keeping up to date" with knowledge that comes in handy for where I work, so I have no intent on dropping them, and certainly not while I work here.
I have my own just so I can be in more control of things. I just started so haven't done much with it. The server cost is about $12 a month through linode.
I'm not in a position where I could host my own Lemmy instance but I can certainly see why. If you keep it private you can have access to the entire Fediverse without worries of defederation. You also have a lot more control over your data and can give friends and family access to the instance and help them out too.
i just installed debian in an old laptop and paid google for a domain for $1 a month ($12/year).
doing it primarily because it seems like a cool thing to mess with and i’ve already learned cool things like DDNS and how to establish free https certificates via “let’s encrypt”. it’s pretty enlightening.
Does Google do some kind of reverse proxy, or are you not worried about your IP being fairly public? I'm interested in doing something similar and hosting at home, but am concerned about having my IP be so public. Obviously lemmy.world knows it, but that still seems better then any random troll knowing it.
