Thanks for all the info. Some day I’ll definitely give it a shot.

What about your instance’s users? Are you responsible for what they post on other servers? Even if they aren’t posting anything illegal, but just spam? Or being very unpleasant? Is it likely that a popular instance could defederate from you if you have too many users like that? And what about someone making a bunch of bot accounts on your instance?

I’m perhaps a bit too paranoid, when I first got my own server and saw thousands of SSH login attempts in half an hour, and plenty of malicious HTTP requests in the apache logs… I’ve felt like it’s a jungle out there. I’ve since changed to a different port for SSH, and disabled password login (only SSH keys). Every now and then though, it seems like my non default port is discovered, and I need to change it again, or my logs will be filled with failed login attempts[1]. Perhaps I’m unlucky for renting a server in an IP space that often gets compromised… it’s just scary to me, since I’ve never even shared it with the general public (just a few friends).

[1]: I realize this isn’t a big deal, but I’d like to avoid it if I can. Perhaps I should investigate some software that automatically bans abusive IPs.

Thanks for the response. I didn’t even think about having to advertise and SEO… I enjoy technical challenges, but having to self-promote is quite draining to me. It might be nice if there was some automatic way to recommend a new instance when new users are looking to create an account, even just based on capacity, but also based on common interests (e.g. people who live in <some region>, people interested in <some topic>, etc). It seems like join-lemmy.org tries to distribute new users somewhat, but it might be nice if it offered to narrow down the list for you based on some information you could choose to provide.

RE self hosting, I was more concerned about legal problems, like this post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world: "If I self host a Lemmy instance for just myself and maybe a few friends are there any risks?”. But more generally, if you let randoms make accounts on your instance, with the goal of taking some load off of the more popular instances.

TL;DR: I enjoy debugging technical issues for a few hours, but I have no interest in having to moderate heavily.

Thanks for the response. After reading your comment and @Kazaii@sh.itjust.works’s, I’m wondering if it would be good to have “bundles” of communities that new users could subscribe to, so that they don’t have to go hunting for communities they are interested in across many different instances.

Or really, even just a big directory of communities spanning many different instances. I’m sure many exist, but ideally it would be something that would show up when you’re first making an account, so you can quickly find communities you’re interested in, without having to put in too much effort unless you want to.

I’m somewhat used to federation because I’ve been using matrix for a year or two now, but I haven’t really explored many lemmy instances yet. Even on matrix, I haven’t really explored much beyond matrix.org.

I was interested in hosting my own Lemmy server, but how would it work for getting a few thousand users?

• how would they discover it? I just picked a server that seemed popular, and I’m already wondering about defederation/etc. I don’t feel like I’d want to make more than a few different accounts, and I’d probably only actively use one or two, tops
• would I be responsible for moderating my users? What if they post spam/worse to other instances? What if they’re just nasty to others? I wouldn’t want my instance to be de-federated. (Though maybe as you get more users, more of them are willing to be moderators)

Besides those issues though, it’s awesome to hear that normal people’s servers could support a few thousand users. I’m sure there’s a person interested in self-hosting among every few thousand people.

Apologies if this is a basic federation question. I considered hosting a matrix instance once, but then I heard it consumed a ton of hard drive space* as you join popular rooms. And I wasn’t sure how it would work if I shared it with some friends, they shared it with some friends, and so-on, and then someone did something bad.

*RE hard drive space, this won’t be a problem when I host something at home, but right now I’m just paying $10/year for a KVM server that I’m using to share hobby web projects with some friends. It has limited storage space.

Interesting, is there some significant difference in the scalability challenges between the two? As someone who knows virtually nothing about either (I never could get into mastodon), they seem similar enough to me.

I agree with the community aspect, and I’m also happy about the open source part. I saw your post in my RSS reader as I was going through my other news and interests. It feels so good to not have the stuff I see decided by some big corporation intending to maximize my engagement at the expense of everything else.

If anyone is interested in RSS, let me know. I highly recommend it, it’s so refreshing to be able to follow most of what you’re interested in, in one app. Also a small app, ~10 MB vs many news sites’ apps that are ~150 MB. Also no ads, ability to dismiss read articles.

(Also yes I realize that Reddit supports RSS too, but I heard that they would have taken it away long ago if it their internal tools didn’t heavily depend on it. The API changes make this seem likely)