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?
I’m currently hosting a Lemmy instance, I started work on it Friday and finished getting it fully running today. It honestly depends on whether or not you want it to be public, as that will determine the amount of resources you put into it. For a personal instance, I think there are relatively few downsides, Lemmy is fairly light in terms of consumption and as long as you have dynamic DNS service you can fairly easily get it running on a home server. For a public instance, especially one hosted on the cloud like mine, it’s considerably more labor and a bit more expensive, but still worth it my opinion. So either way go for it, just be aware of your goals going into it.
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.
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
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.
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.
Docker’s honestly really easy to use, is there anything specifically challenging you about it? I’d be happy to explain how any of it works or how to use its features.
You can federate with whoever you want and not be at the whim of other system admins.
You have your data and won’t lose it if your instance suddenly shuts down.
Downsides:
Your instance won’t be federated very well at first. You may need to use some tricks like Lemmony to get broad federated content to show up in your instance.
Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It’s not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you’re actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.
But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin’ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don’t read.
These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default… So you’re more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot’s docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you’re getting into.
Additionally it’s going to cause you headaches if your server is low spec. The federation queue is not well optimized for GIGANTIC subscription counts like this. There is an active draft PR working on it, but using that script is still a bad idea.
Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you.
To be frank, this liability risk exists even in well-moderated communities as it only takes one rogue poster/commenter to “contaminate” your own instance…
Liability is not binary. There is a qualitative change in risk as you transition from “I subscribed to 100 actively moderated communities that I read and am familiar with” toward “I subscribed to everything there is including the worst of the worst and I didn’t realize I was doing so and don’t look at the results”.
Also, moderation activities federate. So even if a rogue poster does “contaminate” the actively moderated communities on a well-admin’ed instance… when those mods and admins delete the offending material they’ll automatically cleanup your instance as well. As a result, it’s the creepy crawly communities that don’t clean up or don’t want to clean up that generate the lion’s share of risk.
Is it 100% safe to sub to well-moderated communities, no. You have to know your local laws and protect yourself. Do you do yourself favors by running lemmony? Also no. These two statements can be simultaneously true.
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