While I’m not interested in encouraging /r/selfhosted users to leave reddit, I thought it would be good to have some discussion around the possibilities for a selfhosted community on lemmy.
It looks as though most users are washing up in [email protected], but this is but a temporary refuge in these troubled times. The single mod is not responsive, lemmy.ml is already struggling with load, and the background lemmy.ml community may not be right for us. If we set up shop here we’re just going to have to move, probably sooner rather than later.
So if we move, do we create our own instance or move to an existing one better aligned with our needs?
Given that there don’t seem to be any instances which are really ideal, the remaining advantages to choosing an existing instance is simply that we rely on someone else’s infrastructure (and the associated time, skill, and responsibility). This is a significant advantage which makes this option tough to pass up, but the equally significant disadvantage is that we don’t get our own place. It’s like renting a room in a frat house rather than building our own mansion.
The remaining option is to create our own instance. If we were to go this route, in my opinion it is critically important that the responsibility for this be shared amongst several people. This dramatically reduces the odds that someone loses interest, or lacks the resources to support the community long term. While I’m certain that everyone in this sub could spin up an instance, we all know that providing high availability to potentially thousands of users is not something to be undertaken on a whim. There’s a significant risk to the community in allowing someone to take this on themselves.
I think fosstodon (mastodon) with several admins is a good model of how something like this can work. I also think it would be a good idea to broaden the subject to FOSS rather than merely self hosting.
So the questions are…
Do you think we should create & support a community on an existing instance, or create our own instance?
If an existing instance then which one?
If a new instance then how would you like to see it operated?
Yeah I have been thinking about how to approach this issue. I don’t have the kind of money to pay for a large instance to be hosted in the cloud. I am curious about the feasibility of hosting Lemmy on a physical server. The hard part being protecting the server from ddos, and other attacks.
Edit: I forgot about things like up time as well. Maintenance, internet outages, ect could all affect users on an instance, especially if there is no redundancy in the servers.
You mean a physical server like from ovh or hetzner? They have 64gb RAM & 500gb or so for ~$60USD a month. I’d be happy to contribute several months costs to get started, and I’m confident we could raise ongoing costs from the community in the future.
I’m the same regarding time. Too much responsibility to go it alone.
That’s kind of the point tho, nobody has the time to bear the responsibility alone while living a life. Would it be feasible to set up a team? Similar to mods, a group of maintainers could share the burden. I’m not trying to dump this directly on you personally, just entertaining the idea.
Well yes, absolutely.
That’s what I said in the post.
I think 3 admins is a good number. Fosstodon is a good example of how this can work.
Thing is, at least 1 of them needs some experience with running a site with many users.