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.

What might make you want to ditch your self-hosted Mastodon instance?

With Lemmy, I didn’t feel a need to pick any specific instance because I can follow communities from anywhere, and it seems to work pretty well.

One downside I’ve encountered with my own Lemmy instance is that post and comment history in the communities I follow begins when I started following them on my new instance. New posts and comments are federated my way, going forward, but I don’t have the ability to go back and view as much history as one would on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, for example.

I’ve joined the Patreon, but I won’t be opening an account on the instance since I’ll be following your communities from my own. Thanks so much!

You’re talking about Lemmy, right?

I provisioned an Ubuntu 22.02 server at Linode. I chose their 2 GB Shared CPU instance type. Once I configured the server to my liking, I ran through the Lemmy-Ansible instructions. (They have other methods, so check the documentation.)

Essentially, you install Ansible on your workstation. I’m on macOS and installed it via Homebrew. You then download their git repository, create the necessary configuration files, and then have Ansible configure the server. It was fairly simple.

I do wish you could federate/sync specific communities to your instance to make searching/subscribing easier.

You mean something that populates your server with a history of posts and comments to communities before your subscribe to them?

It’s something that Linux users have been saying for 20 years and it’s outdated. It makes sense when maybe your computer came with less than a GB of RAM, but these days I usually configure a server with a small amount of swap (like a couple of GB), and I set swappiness to something very low like 5.

I’ve been using Logseq at work and I LOOOOVE it.

It’s a timeline approach. So, I just enter notes for each day. I’ve developed a habit of just putting things down when I need, including random stuff, links to Slack conversations, etc. I then use tags to bind things together, and there are a couple of plugins in use.

That’s pretty much been my experience, as well.

I can’t imagine it’d work without a domain, as your instance will need to talk HTTPS with other instances.