Hello, with the spicy beehaw drama I was wondering, would it be possible to selfhost a lemmy instance literally just for yourself and no one else to like, circumvent any defederation shenanigans? As all instances federate per default, this should work right?

Allthough, as far as my understanding of how federation works is that I would need to manually subscribe to every community on every instance that I’m interested in as federation only syncs communities that have at least one subscriber on the hosting instance, correct?

Or is there a way to subscribe to EVERYTHING?

Other than that is there any obvious downside to doing that?

  • martin_uieafa@feddit.de
    3·
    1 year ago

    Other than that is there any obvious downside to doing that?

    You must be able to administrate and pay for a server.
    Apart from that, it would not be nice to participate in the network and use the computing capacity of others, but not bring any infrastructure into the network yourself (by registration lock).

    • BootlegHermit@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      It’s not really all that difficult to spin up your own “server”. Sure, desktop hardware isn’t exactly targeted towards running a web server, but for a purpose like your own Lemmy/federation, I’d imagine just about any old hardware from the last 5 years or so oughta be fine.

      • StickBugged@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        Not sure what specs are needed for a kbin instance, but pretty much anything running an x64 processor and a reasonable amount of ram should work, even if it’s really old.

        • Spy@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          I think the biggest issue you might have is storage since as far as I understand everything you subscribe to is pushed and saved to your server, at least for a period

      • martin_uieafa@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        To me, the desktop hardware note sounds like you want to host the instance at home. In that case you need a suitable router, a static IP address or a DNS service, besides your own domain.

    • TooL@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      But if you are pulling all the data to your instance by subscribing, wouldn’t this actually alleviate some of the load on the original instance? Obviously not as much as if you were hosting the content yourself, but still moreso than if you were directly interfacing with their instance?

      Or am I completely wrong there. I don’t have a firm grasp of how content stored/cached between instances.

    • Lilkev@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      So, if I already have a server in my house, I could theoretically spin up a Lemmy or kbin instance solely for myself?