I think it's a matter of personal preference.

I've been running my own Mastodon instance for several months now, and I've enjoyed it. I don't have to rely on someone else, either, which is nice. I'm in control of everything on that instance.

As for Lemmy, I just started my own instance today, and am currently writing you from it. What made me decide to setup my own instance was some performance issues I was seeing with Lemmy.world, although that might have been an UI problem. Anyway, I enjoy doing this stuff, so I'm running my own instance for the sake of doing it.

On the flip side, it's more expensive and time consuming, and I'm the one who has to worry about backing up data, etc. Like I said, though, I enjoy doing it, so it's no big deal.

I feel that speed is the biggest benefit. I was on kbin.social and in the beginning everything was fine, but after a while when they got more and more users it was terrible. Every second click led me to cloudflare sometimes even with the capcha.

On my own instance now since yesterday everything is so fast! I chose lemmy because it's written in Rust and I have the feeling that it will be more resourceful and with less bugs than /kbin because of that ^^

I run my own instance, the benefit is privacy and reliability. Everything is controlled on your own server. You also aren’t reliant on someone else running an instance that could go down at any time, either permanently or an outage. Been a problem with Lemmy.ml recently.

Running my own instance using AWS's free tier for now, though I think I'll keep it after. It makes scaling soo easy and simple if my instance ever takes off. Which I don't know if it ever will lol. The reason why I even created one is to actually use my domain name for something rather than keep paying for a domain that I'll never use for anything.

I did. The benefits as I see them:

• I can still use Lemmy if the instance I would have used as my "home instance" ever went down.
• Even if a public instance doesn't go down, all this extra load is making strange bugs surface that I don't encounter (I still have the live refresh bug everyone has, but not this one).
• I have full control over my account.
• If I ever want to get to customizing my UI later, I can.
• Content I create originates on my instance, and I have full control over it. I can't stop other instances from caching what I post publicly, but this still gives me more data governance.
• I can curate my "All" tab to only show stuff I actually want to see, instead of trying to figure out how to block communities (not sure if that's possible for regular users).
• I get a custom domain which I think is pretty neat.

I was discussing this with other lemmings on matrix and it seems there is not much help if you dont have a community to build on your own instance. Now if you do host for yourself then you can federate with other instances to subscribe and pull from their communities which does reduce the total load on those services but that is about it.

Communities are going to Win/Loose based on personalities and critical mass, and the people hosting those communities will just have to increase their hosting needs.

From what I've seen and read, server to server traffic is less taxing on instances than client to server. So even if your instance is JUST you, it would be your instance talking to everything else so it would have some net benefit on the federation. But it would take a lot of users self-hosting solo instances for this to help in any noticeable way, I'd think.

There is certainly no downside to running a solo instance, if you're even slightly interested I would say go for it!

If you host your own, do you need to establish federation with all other instances or only with the ones you want to use communities from?

If I only federate with lemmy.world, would I be able to see comments on /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world on my instance made by a user from lemmy.ml?

Would a user that reads /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world on lemmy.ml see my comments, if I only federate with lemmy.world?

I did it. So far I've noticed a few things, for example you have to populate/federate the communities yourself, and it can take a long time. It took hours to retrieve and catch up all the lemmy.world posts. I expect it to be an ongoing thing. When you first connect to a community, it downloads the first 20 posts, but all the comments are empty.

The plus side though is it is very fast for me. And nobody can delete my profile.

I'm selfhosting Lemmy and its SUPER fast. Just think of it more of a personal caching layer than anything else.

I've been looking to do the same for the many pros I've seen posted here, but maybe someone can give me some clarity on a very big downside to me.

From my understanding most instances are pretty liberal with federating anyone, then blacklisting bad actots or problematic instances. However as adoption grows is there not the potential for larger instances to move towards a whitelist, and possibly move towards only federating with known, established instances or ones with established conditions? Possibly flat out banning personal instances due to moderation overhead?

Perhaps my understanding is incorrect, but seems to me that there could be a big future risk your personal server turns into an island and all of your past engagement is no longer in your control.

Appreciate if you guys shared some guides on setting it up. I’m not new to selfhosting but tried setting it up and failed with strange errors all day long :(

less thing to worries like you dont need an email to use it from single user instance, lemmy now dont have 2nd authentication like totp at the moment and it may have risk to get pawned and leak your email address so yeah it is better to run your own single user instance

I host my own instance, but I like selfhosting as a hobby. I really love having all my account/login stuff on my own hardware and my own backups. If I break something, its just my own stuff that broken, no harm done to any other users. I don't really plan on hosting any of my own communities, just participating in others. I'm an avid seflhoster, and my setup is pretty exotic compared to the vast majority of hosters, but I got the whole thing working perfectly over a day. Much better than when I tried to get mastodon working. More power to more fediverse stuff though.