With our growth numbers and with kbin finally
with Lemmy again, things around the link aggregator fediverse feel more active than ever. Today when browsing all on Jerboa I saw so many more communities, posts, and comments than even yesterday. It's starting to feel like we have some real traction going on here. Let me know if you agree or disagree.
Some of my favorite communities are in the instances that Beehaw defederated from. However the instance I use chooses to federate with everyone so I can see everything from everywhere.
I decided to self-host my own instance for that reason. That way I'm actually totally in control of what I'm seeing. It does make finding new communities less organic, but it's easy enough with the new listing tools. Probably not worth the money if all I ran on my server was Lemmy, but as an added service it's great.
I selfhost several things for personal/family use on my own hardware. I couldn't get Lemmy working behind Traefik which is what I use as a reverse proxy.
So I decided to go get a cheap VPS, and since it was kinda overkill for a one person Lemmy instance, and the fact that it wasn't on my home network, I decided I might as well let other people use it too. I'll probably cap user count at some point if necessary unless I could get donations to cover higher costs.
And anyway I think even a one person instance on a home network was probably a bad idea. I expose some of my services through a reverse proxy but they're not advertised or known to the public like Lemmy would be, federating and plastering my URL next to all of my comments.
Would be an interesting idea to fork and do a 'Lemmy Lite' which is just a single-person instance, doesn't host any communities, but lets you join communities/federate with them the same way a full install does.