I am still playing around with Lemmy like I am sure a lot of people are. I have accounts on multiple instances to see how things are and what not.
I understand why beehaw decided to defederate with .world, I just didn’t think much about the consequence of it after it happened. Today I was browsing the !anime@lemmy.ml from my beehaw account and looked at the same from my this .ml account and realized I am missing so posts… Any user from .world posting a discussion thread for an anime I watch from, I can’t participate in…
I could create my own discussion post about the anime, but now there are two posts going about the same thing. beehaw users would be able to see and participate in this now, but every other instance will see two posts. Duplicating the same thing and splitting the discussion unnecessarily.
I love the power, control, and principles behind Lemmy and the wider fediverse, its just something that is annoying me at the moment. Its amazing for taking care of spam instances (70k users with no posts? yea right), but when one large/popular instance spanks another, it can be problematic. Thinking of maybe self hosting (which I am no stranger to) as a way to avoid an issue like this in future.
Still like Lemmy and wanting to push through these “quirks”, but just wanted to vent a little.
Yea was considering it. Already have a server where I self host a lot of things for my own use. Just concerned about security, as my server isn’t reachable via the internet (so security has been a bit “loose” so far since it doesn’t really matter) and I would have to open a port for this.
Also opens a few privacy issues. Either I use my existing domain which would expose my dns records and SSL cert history to anyone who wants to know or just buy a new domain just for Lemmy. Even still through, my IP would be permanently attached to the server which would be public for anyone wanting to follow up my instance. I could try and host it behind a VPN that allows port forwarding, but just adding more complexity and cost the setup…
Could also just buy a cheap VPS and just use that for just the Lemmy instance so I wouldn’t need a VPN. Just feels like it would go a little bit against the self hosting spirit since I actually have my own hardware to do so…
You could host on Oracle free tier. I use an ARM free instance, which is plenty for me. And you can always scale or move somewhere else if you’d have many more users.
Cloudflare Tunnels are a great option as well if you’re willing to use them. I run something called frp to do something similar using cloud servers under my control. There are many ways you can set it up so only it would be very hard to get to anything but what you are very specifically exposing.
You can rent a VPS and host VPN on it