Federation is on by default on all instances. As soon as you search and subscribe to remote communities they’ll start federating. So far so good on my little one user instance.
So far so good on my little one user instance as well.
So you pay to host a “url” to host your instance?
no you need a domain - if you already have one you can use a subdomain, e.g. lemmy.mydomain.com - then you deploy a server, point the (sub)domain to it, then install and configure lemmy. Then, if you’re so inclined, you can create communities on that instance that federated systems can participate in. The content is hosted on your instance but the subscribers are logging in mostly though other instances.
Do you know – do most people run cloud instances, or just a spare computer sitting in the closet collecting dust? I’d be tempted to looking into my own, but don’t want to spend a small fortune keeping a large EC2 just because it sounded interesting one weekend.
well, I’d venture that most people in this sub are running locally, which is quite doable. But even on a cloud instance there isn’t a lot of compute involved. The instances listed here for under USD 20/year would be fine: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/186441/from-14-95-yr-openvz-7-2-ipv4-solusvm-lax-nyj-jax-raid-10-ssd#latest
I haven’t heard of them before. Awfully reasonable pricing. I’ll check them out, thanks!
I’m running on my NAS.
That’s an interesting thought. I hadn’t considered that as an option.
I highly recommend storing your DB and pictrs directories on an SSD volume.
You can absolutely host at home if youve got the speed and bandwidth. Just a matter of port forwarding and making sure security is good, maybe upgrade to a prosumer firewall. I use Unifi and host RUST game servers.
I can’t speak for everyone, but when GPU prices were super high, I bought a prebuilt withe a graphics card for cheaper than just buying the card itself. I pulled the card out of that (swapped with my old one, actually), and now use that prebuilt with my old GPU as a server.
I run my instance on Hetzner cloud. CX11 is less than 5 euro/month.
By default lemmy instances will federate when they’re made aware of each other. I don’t think your instance will federate with any of you set it up as a private instance, though.
Other than that, you can blacklist instances you don’t want to federate with.
After I setup my lemmy instance a few weeks ago and subscribed to a bunch of communities, I played around with the options to see what they do. I toggled the private instance to see what happen. Turns out it can federating just fine. I could post and comment in the communities I subscribed. Then I realized there are two big problems with turning on the private instance option:
- I checked the mod logs on some large instance, and turns out they are banning private instances that they came across with (possibly those private instance were a source of spam accounts). Luckily my instance is not banned.
- When I restarted my lemmy container, it refused to run again, throwing error about how you can’t turn on private instance option and federation option at the same time (even though it’s working when I tested it). I had to toggle the private instance option off manually in postgres table in order to get lemmy start running again.
Did you report that issue to the lemmy github? Sounds like something the devs should probably address.
I set up my own instance to mess around with (and what I’m posting from now). The other instances interact with mine just fine and by default. It is certainly possible they could explicitly blacklist your instance, but short of an admin of another instance personally taking umbrage with you I can’t see that happening.
For myself I have set my instance to be private (for me and some friends) and the other instances I “federate” with are done on a whitelist, although you can definitely open up to everything and instead deny specific instances with a blacklist.
