I feel like over the past few months, the main thing preventing me from getting super active in the fediverse has been all of the drama surrounding federation and instances shutting down.
I just want to be able to turn my brain off, and not have to think “Will this instance be around in 6 months?” every time I post.
As a result, I’ve been thinking about creating a Lemmy and/or Mastodon instance that is literally just me and no one else. No communities or anything, simply me posting to other instances via this private instance. And I know that this instance will stay alive and federated for as long as I keep hosting it.
However before I go through the effort of setting these up, I want to know what people think about private instances. Is this bad taste? Is it a logistical nightmare? Have people done this before? And what would the hardware requirements for a 1 user instance look like?
There are plenty of people that do this, and it seems to be pretty straightforward.
There is a significant risk going forward though- if the undesirables (the ones that currently get larger instances defederated) start doing this in any major way, then the larger instances will block new federation or smaller instances by default. Starting now is actually probably a good move, since you might be grandfathered in when that occurs.
Also, be aware of local laws regarding content you host. You could be liable for illegal content you inadvertantly receive.
You could be liable for illegal content you inadvertantly receive.
There is a “private instance” button in the admin settings, but while it sounds perfect (prevents anyone not logged in seeing your instance), it currently breaks federation (or rather, stops your instance from starting up) which makes it useless for single-user instances :/
I think it’s inevitable; I imagine that in the future there will be an application and vetting process if you want to federate with a major instance, as most users will not be interested in running their own instances, and your federation can be a source of work for the mods/admins.
The common term for this is “single user instance” and they’re not at all uncommon.
I’m replying to you from my single user microblog.pub instance. It actually only works for a doctor user, and I’ve really liked it since I’ve started it.
I have no problems interacting with Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc. instances. It works with Lemmy as well as Mastodon does (which is to say, it works ok with Lemmy, but not ideal).
It uses a SQLite database, so, on my computer, I need Python to run the server, and nginx/caddy/Apache to proxy requests and handle https.
There are a few downsides. I host at home, so if my Internet goes down (which it does periodically), it’s down. Also, Mastodon lets you follow hashtags, but that is somewhat useless on a single user instance, since all the posts coming in are from people I follow. Search is non-existent for me, since, again, it only knows about people and posts I’ve already interacted with.
I have a Lemmy account to do most of my interaction with Lemmy, and a Mastodon account on a somewhat large instance for searching, and for periodically browsing its local feed. But mostly, I spend my time on my own instance, and an very happy with it.
- only works for a single user.
Stupid typo. Microblogpub doesn’t yet have editing capability, which is one of its problems.
I host my own Mastodon instance. If you’re technically proficient enough and don’t mind the extra work, I highly recommend it.
I am hosting mine for the same reason you’re considering it: I don’t want my stuff to disappear and I want to be in control of my own social media destiny as much as possible.
Now, there are some headaches I haven’t seen mentioned here, so let me toss some things out for you:
- Until someone follows you on an instance, no one else there will know you exist. Meaning, no one on, say, mastodon.social will see your post tagged with a hashtag—or you generally—until at least one person on the instance follows you.
- You will not have an easy time seeing people post history before you start following them because your server doesn’t know about them.
- Following hashtags is…not super helpful because your instance isn’t ingesting a lot of data.
You may be thinking, bro, that sucks.
And you’d not be wrong, except for the fact that you’re the admin of your own server and you can do whatever you want with it. So, head on over to GitHub and fork
- Fedifetcher. This will ingest alllllllll sorts of stuff for you. Backfill new follows and followers, boosted and favorited threads etc.
- GetMoarFediverse. This will allow you to define hashtags and instances or query your db and have the content ingested. Want to see all the posts from #food from mastodon.social? No big deal.
I’d suggest, if tech savvy enough to go with digitalocean and just admin the whole server yourself, but bump up one level in ram instead of going with a managed hosting solution with less control.
Feel free to message with questions if you have them!
The impression I get is that personal instances are part of what is intended.
If you can, go for it. It’s not rude, and no one should care or even really notice.
I’ve been thinking of doing the same thing.
Its been working well for me with kbin. Over the last week, while the large instances struggled to stay up and federating, my instance constantly had new content coming in from whoever was still up.
I host my own Mastodon instance. If you’re technically proficient enough and don’t mind the extra work, I highly recommend it.
I am hosting mine for the same reason you’re considering it: I don’t want my stuff to disappear and I want to be in control of my own social media destiny as much as possible.
Now, there are some headaches I haven’t seen mentioned here, so let me toss some things out for you:
- Until someone follows you on an instance, no one else there will know you exist. Meaning, no one on, say, mastodon.social will see your post tagged with a hashtag—or you generally—until at least one person on the instance follows you.
- You will not have an easy time seeing people post history before you start following them because your server doesn’t know about them.
- Following hashtags is…not super helpful because your instance isn’t ingesting a lot of data.
You may be thinking, bro, that sucks.
And you’d not be wrong, except for the fact that you’re the admin of your own server and you can do whatever you want with it. So, head on over to GitHub and fork
- Fedifetcher. This will ingest alllllllll sorts of stuff for you. Backfill new follows and followers, boosted and favorited threads etc.
- GetMoarFediverse. This will allow you to define hashtags and instances or query your db and have the content ingested. Want to see all the posts from #food from mastodon.social? No big deal.
I’d suggest, if tech savvy enough to go with digitalocean and just admin the whole server yourself, but bump up one level in ram instead of going with a managed hosting solution with less control.
Feel free to message with questions if you have them!
Why would there be a consensus? You don’t need anyone else’s permission to run whatever sort of instance you like.
Fair enough! I’ve just gotten used to an internet where you’ll get into drama for sneezing the wrong way so I wanted to make sure there wasn’t any weird taboo around it.
I thought I’d also mention this very useful script: Lemmy-Easy-Deploy, which was specifically made for users without much experience self-hosting. At the minimum, all that you need to do is edit one file, and then run
./deploy.shevery time you want to upgrade to a new Lemmy release.Oh my god! This is brilliant. I’ve spent the last two days following various guides and hitting a brick wall each time! Thank you!
Yeah, it’s great. The dev even went out of his way to fix the arm64 situation, which was important for me as I got a cheap Hetzner ARM64 server for my instance :D
I guess the question is whether or not federation is automatic. If it’s manual, then every instance you want to interact with will have to federate with your instance.
So is it automatic?
That’s the question!
What’s the answer?
There is no answer.
Honestly in my opinion that’s how federation should work. Everyone should have their own instance of social media and they all talk together
I mean short and long term there’s pros and cons to that. however there’s a reason why that started to fall appart with e-mail. In short if it gets popular, than hosting servers with no throttling or post limits means spammers are going to go crazy, and rather than play the never ending unwinnable whack a mole game as bad actors create thousands of instances a day, hosts of any instances worth targetting will have to do a “instances are assumed malicious until proven benign”, (IE a whitelist method)
Yeah people ruin all good things.
