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.
If you can self host, do it. Definitely worth having the freedom over your own server and not having to worry about what someone else decides you can or can’t see
Federation is one sided?
You can still be defederated by another instance, but most likely they won’t care unless you go out of your way to harass their users or create a bot farm.
Well given the shitstorm around shitjustworks just because of c/thedonald… Lemmy instance mods are no different to Reddit mods lol
Did they promptly ban it as they should have?
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.
You can rent a VPS and host VPN on it
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.
until beehaw defederate your own instance
That is also another concern of mine for self hosting. I know the fediverse is facing a massive bot problem right now and some suggestions of doing whitelists or blacklists to help combat this, so having my own private instance could even be a worse move in the near future.
If you are a single user instance (meaning you disable registration) or only allow friends & family basically I think there is very little to worry about w/r/t them defederating for technical/bot/etc reasons.
Yeah, hosting your own Lemmy instance will quickly turn into the equivalent of running your own mail server. It’s just not something you want to deal with because you’ll spend hours dealing with blacklists, spam, government requests and other BS.
I’m sure things will stabilise and servers will emerge that get the balance between moderation, federation and uptime right, and then you can migrate to their instance and set up a recurring donation to pay for what it would cost you to run your own server.
That depends. I think a one user instance as jumping point to the fediverse won’t be too much hassle.
What should I do to get all these? Am I hosting my mail server in a wrong way?
So you’re running a mail server and you never had any issues with delivery because your IP address ended up in a blacklist?
I think it was in UCEPROTECT-Level2 or UCEPROTECT-Level3 a couple of times, but it wasn’t an issue because these are a subnet and ASN level blacklists that offer paid “whitelisting”, so no sane person uses these abominations anyway. My emails can sometimes end up in a Spam folder for whatever reason, but I don’t recall ever having them completely bounced.
If they would go as far as to defederate with your specific instance, you should seriously reconsider whether their instance or their community actually have any value to you
Even in the most safe space-y parts of Mastodon (which has way more experience with trolls & assholes than Lemmy just by existing for longer), single user instances don’t get defederated without reason. So I’d be more in favor of reflecting inwards and wondering if there is a specific reason why they defed’d me.
Defederating just for the sake of defederating is, of course, something extraordinary. But having a reason to defederate != having legitimate reason to defederate. After all, instance admins are not almighty gods with infallible moral compasses, they are just humans.
I’m more concerned about whitelists where I need to apply for federation with the big players or some sort of automated bot solution that may inadvertently blacklist small, legitimate servers.
Then we need enough communities and users outside of big player instances. The power is in our own hands.
Also, if they still do implement whitelists and make an application process more than just asking nicely, refer to my previous comment.