Yeah definately a “water is wet” kinda revelation.

Also, given that I am not Chinese, I dont really see much of a risk for foriegn citizens. I would be more concerned with my own governments spying (and most all of them do in the western world).

I stopped running my own a while ago. Its no longer really decentralized and the big players (google/microsoft) will often just blacklist you for little reason.

That said I DO maintain my own domain and backups. So i can take my email to whatever hosting provider I want.

I also noticed, during the migration, that if you simply register your domain with one of the big players (ie: Google Workspace or M365) you will often get whitelisted and email will flow easier. This was easier when they had a free tier though.

I have a lab at home and do host some stuff for myself from there in a small DMZ (ie: Miniflux RSS readers, Plex through Reverse proxy etc).

But I used a linode for my lemmy/kbin stuff. Reason being is that the code is fairly new and there may be exploits bugs and

1. I dont want to deal with my ISP made an instance is exploited and becomes some type of C2 box or spews out spam. Kbin specifically already has PRs to fix XSS and Sql injection stuff, the former of which is usually avoidable if you just follow some pretty basic principles. So its a concern.

2. Linode has better bandwidth than my non-symmetrical ISP uplink and is on its own quota.

I’ve run linodes for years. My blog runs on them. I still host a variety of other services on them. They are good for everything from gaming servers to a blog etc.

They did get bought out by akamai a while back. And have raised their prices but they are still solid.

Nanodes are awesome deals frankly.

Im currently on the 4GB dedicated. However heres an htop of it.

https://imgur.com/a/NpEsw4t

I am currently the only user. Im considering opening it up to limited users but not really having communities once i get a lot of the instances cached and indexable.

Others like @leopardboy@netmonkey.tech are running on a 2GB shared just fine. I will likely move to that if i choose to keep it solo for sure, or under 100 users and no communities.

I dont have the time to really moderate others or content on the instance. So i dont think I plan to host any communities at all. I do wish you could federate/sync specific communities to your instance to make searching/subscribing easier.

Yes the ansible config worked fine for me. I worked for days to get an kbin instance up. Ansible worked first go.

I have yet to get email working but otherwise its solid. Linode will block email btw if you account is new (and frankly may be blocking mine now). You just have to put in a case and justify and it should be fine. My account should be old enough to be exempt but I will likely do it anyhow. Their support is pretty good.

Getting federation crawled and communities added is a bit slow. Mostly because the other instances are a bit slow.

A few pointers if you havent done admin yet.

1. Put nothing in the federation allow list unless you want to go whitelist only. Over time as other instances hit yours and you search others, the linked list of instances will grow. Just use the blocklist if you want to block certain instances. I havent found a good way to block the growing number of instances in case they have some illegal content like CSAM. So…i may just go whitelist anyhow

2. Searching for instances seems to be CPU heavy on mine. Its not a problem though. You just cant simply plug in a URL of a community in another instance if you havent linked. You will get a 404 if you do. So you have to go to search, looking for that community by hitting search a few times until it shows up, then you can join and it will start crawling

3. I have no idea what “Private instance” does other than i believe it will keep your instance form starting in the future if you have it checked AND federation turned on. I saw some logs in dockers startup when i did it but nothing in the UI.,

Subscribe to the communities. They aren’t clones. Just different instances. There’s a few links on how to subscribe.

My reccomendation is to go here, hit the home icon and type your instance name. Then search for instances that interest you and join.

https://lemmyverse.net/

I was going to say “are we in a simulation” but this would work too.

I mean there’s precedence. Avian bird flus have been known to infect humans.

Frankly i find it inconsiderate to the social contract to go out on holidays, and sometimes around them.

Its frankly why i always found Black Friday and the “scope creep” of this festival of consumerism partially so repulsive. I mean its repulsive on its own just in the way people act, but doubly so in that it runs right through a national holiday.