This is corny, but thanks for being awesome! It feels so nice to see this community grow out of a shared vision of what the internet should be.
Standing up my little instance has been a blast! I’m not quite done with it, but your combined enthusiasm gives me hope for the future of the internet. 😊
As an old fart it pretty cool to see some moving back to how things were. Smaller more personal spaces run by people instead of corporations.
Fellow old fart. I remember having to call my buddy so he could hook his family’s phone line to his bbs before I’d dial in. I remember standing up a web server in the days where you could find all the new sites on a page at NCSA or CERN. When there was a literal directory of the WWW.
The corps definitely made it easier to get out there, and thank god for online shopping, but the dream of connecting with random people on the other side of the world never had banner ads or unskippable video propaganda.
Yea I ran a c64 bbs the went wwiv multiline. god the upgrade from 300baud to 14.4k or 19.2 felt like lightspeed…God im old
I really thought that I was NOT old fart… but since I remember lowering coax (not LAN) cable to my buddy one floor below over the window to play AOE… I guess I am :)
Hehe. One of my first tasks as a student worker was dragging coax through the department’s dropped ceilings, upgrading their network from Apple’s “Localtalk” to 10-base-2, because the university hadn’t gotten its own internal networking sorted out. There was ZERO security - anyone who could plug in could send print jobs to the President’s office - access controls didn’t exist. In retrospect, daisy-chain is a really dumb network architecture, but coax was cheaper than cat-5, the total length of cable was way shorter, and you didn’t have to buy any kind of fancy network switch.
Magical times. I learned so much, without it feeling like learning at all, and it was so exciting I never needed a repeat lesson. I could probably still find the resistor you have to cut on a Mac+ motherboard to upgrade RAM, but I have to look up the syntax every time I want to create a new SQL table. Makes me wonder what kids today are putting together for similar experience. Selfhosting seems close, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world where my grandma (or, I suppose, by that time, I ) pick up a Lemmy-box from BestBuy, slot it into the router, and join the federation.
Oh wow, thanks for your perspective!
Regarding your last point: My chinese-made e-scooter can’t be readily used right after you buy it. You have to:
- download the app
- register an account
- sign away your soul and firstborn in the privacy and TOS agreement
- Watch a several minute long & UNSKIPPABLE intro video
- Finally unlock/activate your scooter
Especially the video felt super dystopian. As if I were not a conscious person, but an asset that needed training.
Hi from another part of the Internet hosted in a basement somewhere in Northern Europe running a different piece of software :-)
People used to make their own sites and dedicated forum boards where the norm. With the mess of old hardware floating about, the overall lowering of bandwidth costs, more options being made available and simpler to deploy, and storage in the TBs coming down on price the population is bound to make things personal again one way or another. Being just another profile on some big platform doesn’t have the ‘me’ mark to it that putting your own together does. Have fun with it, break things and make them better, always a new idea to be had.
Unfortunately no old cloud servers or switches on ebay. As such availability of used hardware is more limited in future.
you dont even need big old iron. I run all my containers etc on old business sff pcs and storage on synology. works great
I’m weird, so I have 10G/40G networking and half a rack that would burn 10 kW when all fired up. My major cost issue is power, which is currently 0.7 EUR/kWh though capped at 0.4 EUR/kWh for a while. I could use some more modern hardware but it’s no longer bountiful and cheap.
Just need to find the right sites. A couple places I’ve gone that seem to pick up a bunch of corporate PLM gear and refurb it are here:
I know about Servermonkey, and the prices there aren’t nice at all. I’m rather sticking with old servers with roughly the same specs, but perhaps twice the wattage and noise, which only run occasionally. The 24/7 stuff is already on a low-power footprint, though I don’t have a successor for that little Supermicro when it bites the dust. I’d rather pay way less than 1 kEUR for it.
I 100% agree with you, thank you all
Any insights on to the cost of running an instance? Talking about cloud based solutions.
beehaw.org recently posted detailed June financials, and the bottom line is something like $600/month, including 1TB of bandwidth overage, for one of the largest public instances (they’re not responding atm or I would post the link). Before the reddit exodus, lemmy.ml was the largest instance, and it was running a couple thousand users on a $100/month VPS. Lemmy.world has posted itself running on a 32-core/64 thread 128GB RAM dedicated server at hetzner. https://blog.mastodon.world.
For an instance with only a few users, like friends & family, it should be pretty cheap.
I haven’t seen what will happen in the long run, but I’m running my one-person instance on a Linode nano server with 1 CPU core and 1GB RAM, which costs $5. Bought a domain for $2.50/year. Seems to be running fine so far, but I might eventually end up moving it to my local unraid server if I have problems with resources.
If you host your own 1 person server, you can federate with everyone else correct? Also, how is your storage usage looking with just one person?
