AbsurdityAcceleratorShould I host my own instance if I don't intend to run a community?
MattI 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.
On the flip side, it's more expensive
Can you go into more detail on this?
Sure.
I run my own instance at a cloud provider, and thus have monthly expenses I wouldn't normally incur, if I were using a public instance.
Oh, gotcha. I guess if using a personal local server, then the only recurring cost would be electricity.
Yes, there is electricity.
I think Internet connectivity could also be an issue, unless you have an ISP that's friendly to you running a publicly accessible server on your Internet connection at home.
Could you run a local server on your desktop that you only turn on whenever as a client? I don't really understand the Fediverse's architecture yet, but as far as I saw instances being down are not a big problem beyond not being able to log in if it's your home instance, and communities fracturing to separate discussions in other instances' local federation caches that only get resynced when the thing comes back up.
What prevents me from running my own instance as a very heavy client?
I've wondered that myself, and I don't know, to be honest, but there are some issues you'd certainly encounter. For example, if you posted any media it would need to be somewhere "always on" or remote instances and users might not be able to see it unless they managed to cache it on time. It means that your posts URL wouldn't be accessible, and such would only be available on servers to which it has already federated. There may be other issues, too, such as queues only keeping undelivered messages for so long, etc.
I'm sure someone with a good understanding of ActivityPub could explain whether or not this is possible.