this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
223 points (97.4% liked)

Selfhosted

40394 readers
380 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The fun part is that you can run it on the same server as your mastodon is already running with no additional costs.

[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] dart@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, gotcha. I guess if using a personal local server, then the only recurring cost would be electricity.

[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Could you run a local server on your desktop that you only turn on whenever as a client? I don't really understand the Fediverse's architecture yet, but as far as I saw instances being down are not a big problem beyond not being able to log in if it's your home instance, and communities fracturing to separate discussions in other instances' local federation caches that only get resynced when the thing comes back up.

What prevents me from running my own instance as a very heavy client? Discounting the public DNS + static globally routable IP part as those can be solved IMO.

[–] leopardboy@netmonkey.tech 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 2 points 1 year ago

Yes you could, but if your instance is down often, it might be that there is some timeout in ActivityPub when your instance will be marked as gone for others and might not get new content once it is up again.