Backstory with reddit

I’ve joined reddit in 2006 I didn’t know what it was but back then it was important to get your short username before it was gone. I didn’t use it until about 3 years ago when I realized I could post my photos there like https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ets2ex/yesterday_i_was_at_a_sumo_wrestling_tournament_in/ to get them in front of many critical eyes.

And since then I was lazy, I knew I was feeding another monster after being able to get rid of google (with the exception of YouTube), Twitter, Facebook, I was still using reddit, mostly for reading but also for the occasional posting.

When I moved to Korea, I wanted to participate in r/Korea which I did for a very short time, until I posted a link to a video with a Fire close to Seoul and got accused of self promotion because instead of using YouTube or imgurl or some 3rd party video hoster I posted it on my own PeerTube instance. I’m banned from posting there until this day and I’m too proud and don’t think I did anything wrong to reach out to the mods of r/Korea and beg them to unban me. At least I still was able to read.

Anyway, back then I was very frustrated and kind of wanted to leave but when I looked around the Fediverse alternatives were not there yet. But they are now!

Why this instance?

I’m oldschool IndieWeb and basically this page from the IndieWeb wiki explains it quite well why I don’t trust other people to host my stuff: https://indieweb.org/site-deaths

I already host a single user Mastodon instance and a family PeerTube instance and my own website.

If possible then I want to own the content I’m posting and be in control of my identity. If I would join a different lemmy or /kbin instance then I feel that i would not gain much over staying at reddit. I would not be able to decide if the instance stays online or not, I would not be able to decide what I can post and what not, I would also not be able to move to a different server or software, etc. So not very different from being on reddit.

I don’t plan on opening this instance to anyone else but me. Perhaps the Threadyversi becomes a huge success and my family wants to join then let’s see but I don’t think that will happen :D

When I host myself then I have the ultimate freedom. Yes it’s still a bit difficult to get an instance up and running but I am sure it will get easier over time.

Why lemmy and not /kbin?

I am aware of all the political implications with the developers of lemmy, but /kbin is written in PHP and MySQL. I know it’s a stupid reason but I just really don’t want to mess with PHP anymore. And lemmy is written in Rust (at least the backend) which I feel has a promising future.

What also is cool is that both are licensed under the AGPL.