I 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.

As someone who likes having control over their data and especially backups, and someone who normally enjoys self-hosting things, I honestly might do it. I'm not sure if I'd want to host a lemmy instance or kbin instance though, since I know they all federate together anyway. I may also end up waiting until the software is more mature too before looking into it.

That's awesome! Running my own social media instances has become a hobby for me.

Having my own Lemmy instance has felt fairly seamless versus using Lemmy.world, but there have been some kinks. For example, when attempting to subscribe to a new community, the server has to pull a bunch of data first. This takes several seconds, but the UI simply says "not found" -- and then after several seconds, the UI updates with the community you want to follow. I figured this out by tailing the logs.

Also, the installation was pretty damn easy, especially when compared to Mastodon.

I'd maybe be interested in trying out Mastodon at some point too, good to hear that Lemmy was easy to install though. I'm not too worried since I have quite a bit of Linux experience, I figure it probably won't be too bad to setup whatever social media instances I'm interested in checking out.

Yeah, if you've got a decent amount of Linux experience, I don't think you'll have any issues. Mastodon's installation is well-documented and works. My only criticism is that it's a bit long and you have to be careful not to miss anything.

On the other hand, I recall installing Pixelfed back several months ago and having a difficult time. The documentation was lacking, and it required me to use Arch Linux, which I had never used. I was able to get it working, but eventually terminated the instance after a while because I was never using it.

Oof, yeah, requiring someone to use Arch definitely seems like a steep requirement lol