Hosting an instance just for yourself?

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?

density,
density avatar

It makes me think of when you sign up for a VPS like linode and they have a bunch of drop-in applications you can click to install. Like cpanel, wordpress etc. But you aren't really fully running it in the same way as if it was physically a device in your home. There are some pro admins taking care of some of the details.

I feel something like that would be the middle ground for people wanting independence without having to learn such deep systems admin skills.

Spzi,

There is one instance dedicated to mimicking /r/all: https://lemmy.directory/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/New/page/1

Check it out. Maybe it partially does what you want, maybe you can learn from them how to subscribe to everything.

would it be possible to selfhost a lemmy instance literally just for yourself and no one else to like, circumvent any defederation shenanigans?

I can imagine many people want a fully federated instance, myself included. Maybe I did not understand the value of defederation, but I think I can decide for myself to what communities I subscribe, or not.

So I do see value in an instance dedicated to not defederating anything, ever. Maybe it even already exists (please let me know). I tried to suggest you can share the instance with others, just make the policy perfectly clear.

jherazob,
jherazob avatar

There's already multiple instances of only one user for very similar reasons, so yeah, if that's what you want you can do it today

ShakeThatYam,
@ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world avatar

I believe an instance can whitelist which would block all other instances and only allow ones it approves. I don't know of one that does that yet, but I could see beehaw doing that in the future—in which case, having a solo instance would not help.

feetongrass,

That’s any interesting idea. Curious to see if it would work.

Kichae,

When people say "instances federate by default", they don't mean the instances engage in active content discovery. They mean the default behaviour when someone goes to look for content that's offsite is to connect to the remote instance.

Running a solo Lemmy or kbin instance puts all of the responsibility of content discovery on your own shoulders. You'll need to go out and scout other instances to see what you want to follow, and then subscribe to those sources in order to keep content flowing.

I highly recommend having a secondary account that you use to subscribe to things somewhat indiscriminately so you can separate out your subscribed feed from your all feed in a meaningful way.

dichtbringer,

This is a good idea, use one account just to sub everything so syncing works and I can use "all" and "subsribed" seperatly, very good idea. Do you know if there is an easy way to "subscribe to everything"? Like a script or something?

Kichae,

Not that I'm aware of. But you can get a list of active group-hosting fediverse sites here: https://fediverse.observer/list From there, you can find the list of groups found on each site and decide what you'd like to subscribe to. I'm sure you could scrape them and build a bot with a little Python or something, if you have any experience with that.

Repulsa,

I've been thinking the same. Going to look up some guides later on to see how much of a hassle it would be.

I think when I looked at doing it with Mastodon, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze for a single user (this was months ago so might be different now) but Lemmy might be better suited.

Cheddar,

I am interested in this as well. If you do find any decent guides I would love a link, and I can do the same if I find anything.

furies,

Does it require some programming knowledge or is it litrerally copypaste?

Repulsa,

I'm hoping for a copypaste solution tbh

asjmcguire,
asjmcguire avatar

That's what I like about kbin, it does both. When it's a bit further along in development, I'll probably look into hosting my own instance of it.

serfraser,
@serfraser@sopuli.xyz avatar

What's happened to beehaw?

Admetus,

Defederation of a couple of servers. Think one was lemmy.world

TooL,

Lol that's a big yikes. Glad I never managed to make an account over at beehaw.

Sabata11792,
Sabata11792 avatar

Some of us are not so lucky.

jherazob,
jherazob avatar

It was simply a moderation issue, the two instances in question were giving them a lot of moderation work, and lacking Mastodon's "limit" option they decided to just defederate them until things settle down a bit, remember that this is all volunteers in their spare time, not employees of a corporation

RomanRoy,
@RomanRoy@lemmy.world avatar

What is the "limit" option?

curiosityLynx,

It's just temporary until mod tools mature enough to deal with the trolls that were using lemmy.world's open registration and automated registration approval to quickly evade bans and troll beehaw.

ripcord,
ripcord avatar

Just curious, which beehaw drama?

Edit: ah, scrolled down a bit and found this, assume that's it.

effingjoe,
effingjoe avatar

They defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.

NotSteve_, (edited )
NotSteve_ avatar

Beehaw is defederating from sh.itjustwor.ks and Lemmy.world.Personally I think it's silly to be upset over it considering defederation is one of the selling points of Lemmy.

Beehaw is just going for a more curated experience which I think is completely fine. I'm sure once they have more moderators they'll consider refederating anyway.

polygon,

It's definitely an interesting selling point. I've always said you have to take the good with the bad on social media, but having independent instances who can curate things a bit means you don't actually have to take the bad if you don't want. Even though the Beehaw admin themselves said this is essentially a nuke and not how they'd preferred to have handled it (Lemmy doesn't have the tools just yet to do it any other way) it's still interesting and unique in social media.

Beehaw is creating an identity for themselves and sticking to it, rather than being a general instance. Some people will love that, some will hate it. But ultimately it's whats going to make Beehaw a unique place to be for those who want it without taking anything away from those who don't. This is all still early stages for Lemmy and there are growing pains for sure, but this sort of thing, to me at least, shows the possibilities of a Federated network.

jherazob,
jherazob avatar

That's the stated plan, wait a bit until things settle

NotSteve_,
NotSteve_ avatar

What do you mean by that?

IntangibleSloth,

Sounded like they may reevaluate once they have more mods

NotSteve_,
NotSteve_ avatar

Oh yeah now it makes sense. Not sure why I didn't understand haha

Banda,

I’ve been curious about this also but for a different reason. I assume all my posts and comments are hosted at the instance I’m subscribed to. Should that server go down away for any reason my account and all its data would be lost right? I’d rather be in control of keeping my own data safe.

asjmcguire,
asjmcguire avatar

There was an excellent post about this today that I saw. Essentially it's like this:

There is an original community, and then there are mirror copies.

So if you post a comment via your server to a community that is actually hosted on kbin.social for example, you are posting a comment to the mirror of that community (on your local instance), which then sends the comment out to the actual original community, which then federates your comment out to all instances that are mirroring that community.

ComradeMiao,

Thanks

martin_uieafa,

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,

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,
StickBugged avatar

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,

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,

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.

Lilkev,
Lilkev avatar

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

martin_uieafa,

In that case you need a suitable router, a static IP address or a DNS service, besides your own domain.

TooL,

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.

Fmstrat,

If I had figured out how to search for threads, I would point you to the thread from yesterday that got a bunch of comments. The answer is, yes, but.

It's not as efficient on the network, as it's a client getting all content for your subscriptions that isn't distributed to other users. But it will work just fine and has advantages like permanent account and control. Invite your friends, all it takes is one or two to make it worth the overhead.

Sal,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

That's perfectly fine!

Some downsides can be that you will pay a monthly fee to rent a server, or expose your home network to the internet (some risk, but for a personal instance the risk is not so high). With regards to how the federation works, you can use your instance to interact with other instances that use open federation (the default) without problem. I don't think that there is a way to subscribe to EVERYTHING. I have to manually fetch communities and subscribe to them to help populate my instance.

0485919158191,
@0485919158191@lemmy.world avatar

Of course, you can host a private instance. That's the whole point if it being federated! Go for it!

vikinghoarder,

Yes it is possible.

Aside from the local communities in your instance right now (and using the local timeline), you already have manually to subscribe to every community you want.

You already want to subscribe only to the communities you are interested in, or else you will get too many unwanted posts because the timeline is not cut to fit you like other social media services.

You can use Lemmy community browser to search for communities in all instances.

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