I’ve been into computers since around the mid 70s. First one was an Altair 8000. I have been selfhosting for years now, self taught and helped along of course by the selfhosting communities.
Not to speak bad of the dead, but I’ve really had it up to my back teeth with their bullshit. So I am in search of some self hosting brethren to chum around with. I figured I’d give Lemmy a try. It’s kind of confusing, but hopefully I can wrap my 70 year old head around it.
I’ve seen a few selfhost forum around the fediverse but they all seem to have been abandoned with threads a year or more old, and no movement. So my question, is there a thriving selfhost/homelab type place that is active? Perhaps one of you good souls could point me in the right direction.
Is there any benefit to hosting your own Lemmy and mesh it with the other Lemmey’s out there? What benefit would that be? From what I understand, hosting your own instance turns out to just be your own personal blog.
I mean, I understand the fediverse, and decentralization, I’m just having a bit of difficulty getting in with the right, active, group.
TIA
ETA: Thank you for the very warm welcome. Hopefully I will be turtley enough for the turtle club.
is there a thriving selfhost/homelab type place that is active?
I mean, you’re right here.
Is there any benefit to hosting your own Lemmy and mesh it with the other Lemmey’s out there?
If it’s your personal instance: altruism. You’re taking some burden off of the main Lemmy servers by hosting your own with your content. You’re saving them bandwidth, storage and CPU time.
If it’s a public instance meant for others to use: you’re participating in decentralisation and keeping the Fediverse alive. Every new instance has their own mods, rules and policies. It’s like a little island connected to other islands to form a community.
I can wrap my 70 year old head around it.
Holy shit I hope my brain can process new tech at that age like you. Good luck, DM me if you have trouble.
I mean, you’re right here.
Thank you I thought I was going insane. It’s not Reddit levels of activity, but I’d say this is pretty dang active. Stats on the right show almost 600 users a day, ~7k a month, almost 100k comments…
I’m not sure “Reddit levels of activity” is necessarily a good thing :)
But yeah that takes some getting used to for sure. I would think this is one of the more popular communities here for kinda obvious reasons given the nature of Lemmy. I’ve only been here since the first great migration but I’ve already seen Lemmy in general grow tremendously.
Yea with that activity comes hosting cost and it has to come from somewhere because 99% of them wouldn’t run their own instance
Holy shit I hope my brain can process new tech at that age like you
I love technology man. I always have since days of reading old Popular Mechanics and Popular Science mags. Here’s some of what I self host.
“I mean, you’re right here.”
To be honest. I miss a lot to find here more new interesting threads every day :(
But well, I hope we can grow as community and find here all that we want
I gotta comment on the mid 70s thing and how great it is to hear that. I have also been into computers since the late 70s (well and early 80s) although I imagine I got started a little younger than you … like I was 8 and writing basic/ assembly on my various machines back in the day (TRS-80 Model III, Tandy CoCo 2, Coleco Adam, C64). So I’m only mid 50s and I thought I was the old guy around here :) But damn if you don’t give me hope that I can stay like this for many years to come.
Well thanks. I feel fortunate to be alive. My first computer was an Altair. Then the Timex/Sinclair, the TI, then just about one of each until some semblance of base line was established and not 20 companies producing propriety devices. It’s been a wild ride. I’m also a mediocre musician of about 65 years and the technology still blows me away every time I sit down to my DAW and controllers.
Sorry to have taken your ‘OldHead’ status from you. lol
This very community seems to be the largest by far - around 45k followers if I’m seeing it correctly. It feels a lot more active than the average Lemmy community as well.
Congrats, you’ve arrived at the right place!
Source: I subscribed to a ton of Lemmy communities to quit Reddit, and the selfhosting ones are so active they routinely push other communities down below the fold unless I sort by new.
btw if you haven’t got into Proxmox yet, have a look at it.
I can definitely sing the praises of Proxmox. One of the three businesses I run from home uses a piece of software called BlueBeam. Feature for feature, I’ve not been able to find an opensource alternative. So I spin up a Windows VM with Proxmox for BlueBeam. I also run quite a few of the helper scripts, tho I am really keeping an eye on that. There seems to be diverging opinions among the devs on how things should operate. I also run a couple of small AI projects on Proxmox, so yea…it gets a work out. For what Proxmox can do, I was honestly surprised that the community edition was free. That’s an awesome piece of software.
This community is actually pretty active!
Looking back on my post, I didn’t mean it to sound like I was throwing shade on the community. Bear with me. I understand fediverse, I dig decentralization, it just might take me a little while to firmly grasp the Lemmy concept. Like there are loads of these like lemmy.ml et al, and there seems to be a selfhost, or home lab something on each of them. All I wanted was a place where all the cool kids hung out at. LOL
It’s like with email addresses, you can have the same email address as someone else as long as you have different servers, like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. So this one is Selhosted@lemmy.world I believe, and it’s the largest on Lenny I believe.
Imo if you’re going to be the only one who would use the instance it is not worth it. Instead look for an instance that lines up with your personal interests (maybe check out the db0 instance).
Content federation basically works on a subscription model so you will only see content from other instances if someonen your instance went out of their way to subscribe to it. Smaller instances suffer under this as they might not even see popular communities from other instances.
It’s been reasonably active here definitely not reddit in it’s prime, I haven’t found it worthwhile to self host lemmy but others may chime in that do. I’ve got a few other things I’m hosting on my Dell r720xd matrix, jellyfin, wireguard, next cloud, gonic and other minor things.
Not that “alternatively young” but the difference is slight here.
Yeah I self host my Lemmy because why not? As well I self host my matrix with bridges to all main chat closed ecosystems because why not?
At least my descendants will own all my comments and posts.
And I also host (not at home, but on vps) my email because why not.
Do you really need any other reason to?
Also, Lemmy rocks, this community is one of the best and more active.
At least my descendants will own all my comments and posts.
If you self-host, how much of that content disappear when your descendants shut down your instance?
I used to host a bunch of academic data, but when I stopped working, there was no institutional support. Turned off the server and it all went away (still Wayback Machine archives). I mean, I don’t really care whether my social media presence outlives me, the experience just made me aware that personal pet projects are pretty sensitive to that person.
Yeah, that is something I keep thinking. I need a way to keep all that working somehow.
Maybe a foundation, to keep personal data for future research scope, or general knowledge. Its sad that all that will go to waste.
Wonder if there’s an opportunity there. Some way to archive one’s self-hosted, public-facing content, either as a static VM or, like archive.org, just the static content of URLs. I’m imagining a service one’s heirs could contract to crawl the site, save it all somewhere, and take care of permanent maintenance, renewing domains, etc. Ought to be cheap enough to maintain the content; presumably low traffic in most cases. Set up an endowment-type fee structure to pay for perpetual domain reg.
Yes, something like that. A non profit foundation would be mandatory.
I’m very similar. Getting into self hosting and finding Lemmy happened somewhat in tandem. Now I’m happily tinkering along and looking at hosting my own instance! This comm has been a huge resource and seems very active!!
Well, I’ve always been aware of Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix, et al, but I really never explored them until now. I have been at Reddit now, since week one, and over the years I have really grown tired of the bullshit that goes on there. Lots of great subs especially selfhost and homelab, and some music subs, but you have to wade through all the crap to get to some good information.
If you self-host your own instance, make sure to disable image hosting / caching. I’ve had to DM a lot of people to inform them of “problematic” images hosted on their instance.
I think for now, I will just be a part of what is already here. Maybe later I may entertain the idea.
I see you are on Lemmy.world, keep in mind self hosting your Lemmy will bypass the heavy censorship going on on Lemmy.world in terms of defederation.
For example another great community and very active is the pirate community on db0, which is banned on your current instance. And not the only one.
Sigh.
Lemmy.world is the safe, gateway drug for lemmy, the Marijuana as it were, a way to recruit normies without scaring them.
After people get comfortable they can move to instances that suit them better.
But the defederation serves a purpose, it’s like saying ‘I believe in completely free speech!!!’ then spamming kids with animal torture porn.
Hmmm well, I am a cannabis enthusiast. LOL And I’m quite familiar with the dark regions of the intertubes.
IMHO not worth to self host Lemmy, as it will be an inferior experience compared to an active server, where you can discover many new communities and posts
Unless the fun of setting it up
