I feel like over the past few months, the main thing preventing me from getting super active in the fediverse has been all of the drama surrounding federation and instances shutting down.
I just want to be able to turn my brain off, and not have to think “Will this instance be around in 6 months?” every time I post.
As a result, I’ve been thinking about creating a Lemmy and/or Mastodon instance that is literally just me and no one else. No communities or anything, simply me posting to other instances via this private instance. And I know that this instance will stay alive and federated for as long as I keep hosting it.
However before I go through the effort of setting these up, I want to know what people think about private instances. Is this bad taste? Is it a logistical nightmare? Have people done this before? And what would the hardware requirements for a 1 user instance look like?
I host my own Mastodon instance. If you’re technically proficient enough and don’t mind the extra work, I highly recommend it.
I am hosting mine for the same reason you’re considering it: I don’t want my stuff to disappear and I want to be in control of my own social media destiny as much as possible.
Now, there are some headaches I haven’t seen mentioned here, so let me toss some things out for you:
- Until someone follows you on an instance, no one else there will know you exist. Meaning, no one on, say, mastodon.social will see your post tagged with a hashtag—or you generally—until at least one person on the instance follows you.
- You will not have an easy time seeing people post history before you start following them because your server doesn’t know about them.
- Following hashtags is…not super helpful because your instance isn’t ingesting a lot of data.
You may be thinking, bro, that sucks.
And you’d not be wrong, except for the fact that you’re the admin of your own server and you can do whatever you want with it. So, head on over to GitHub and fork
- Fedifetcher. This will ingest alllllllll sorts of stuff for you. Backfill new follows and followers, boosted and favorited threads etc.
- GetMoarFediverse. This will allow you to define hashtags and instances or query your db and have the content ingested. Want to see all the posts from #food from mastodon.social? No big deal.
I’d suggest, if tech savvy enough to go with digitalocean and just admin the whole server yourself, but bump up one level in ram instead of going with a managed hosting solution with less control.
Feel free to message with questions if you have them!
I know a few people who have done this with Mastodon and it works quite well so far. Just like email, it doesn’t really matter where it’s hosted as long as it’s being respectful and not sending out spam.
That being said, AFAIK you can’t transfer a Lemmy account between instances yet, so if you ever change your mind and want to move to another instance, you may have to create a new account.
The impression I get is that personal instances are part of what is intended.
If you can, go for it. It’s not rude, and no one should care or even really notice.
I’ve been thinking of doing the same thing.
You are looking for the Self Hosting community. They should have a lot of material that can help fill you in.
There are plenty of people that do this, and it seems to be pretty straightforward.
There is a significant risk going forward though- if the undesirables (the ones that currently get larger instances defederated) start doing this in any major way, then the larger instances will block new federation or smaller instances by default. Starting now is actually probably a good move, since you might be grandfathered in when that occurs.
Also, be aware of local laws regarding content you host. You could be liable for illegal content you inadvertantly receive.
I think it’s inevitable; I imagine that in the future there will be an application and vetting process if you want to federate with a major instance, as most users will not be interested in running their own instances, and your federation can be a source of work for the mods/admins.
