I host my own. Specifically for myself and those who are friends or friends of friends.
I have a cluster of servers operating in my garage. Free real-estate for tons of stuff I want to host. I have to "pay" for electricity... the rest was already paid for long ago. My electricity cost for my whole cluster... is an estimated $1750 a year. But that cluster is 160 CPU cores, 750 GB of RAM, and ~400TB of storage. You ain't getting that on a cloud hosted provider for $145 a month. About $110 of that is subsidized by my business operations. I host email, websites, nextcloud, plex, etc... boatloads of stuff.
I really like the overall concept of Lemmy, so I decided to set up lemm.ee to support the Lemmy network with my skillset. I have previously had the privilege of being responsible for running large platforms online (end-to-end, everything from operations to software engineering), and so far, this experience seems to be extremely relevant for running Lemmy in its current state.
As for paying for hosting, my initial plan was to to just pay for everything myself as kind of a hobby, but the userbase at lemm.ee has been very gracious in first asking me several times to share costs, and then actually sending money once I set up donations. I'm not sure yet if this donations-based funding will be sustainable, or if it will fall off after the initial hype dies, but for now it's really awesome to see that there are several other people who believe in lemm.ee and want to share financial responsibility for it.
Why?
Seemed fun to do. Wanted to support something that gets people away from reddit.
How did I pay for it? I have a miniature datacenter in my house, complete with redundant power. Hosting lemmy is a drop in the bucket as far as my resources are concerned. As such, there really isn't a measured cost for it. The infrastructure was already there and running, and lemmy doesn't consume much of it.
I don't take donations.
I've just launched one:
Why?
- I get free hosting with my job
- I'm a FOSS enthusiast and want to contribute to the fediverse
I started !programming.dev because I am a moderator of several 100k+ subs over on Reddit and I didn't want my communities to not have a place to go if Reddit crashed and burned (even though it's incredibly unlikely). The main sub I moderated (/r/ExperiencedDevs) for years wanted user verification to combat the spam that was newbies commenting and posting about things they didn't really know or understand. This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn't really care about their communities.
I am also a strong supporter of pulling control away from megacorps. We need more small to medium sized businesses on the planet.
For selfish reasons? I wanted to work on something new and have true ownership over it, the ability to build a community that worked together to build something without capitalism standing in the way. It might seem strange, but one of the first things I did was bring multiple other people on board to help me maintain the server, even going so far as to add domain managers to the domain name. This was all to counter the major questions people were asking around "what if the host decides they don't want to host anymore?". Well hopefully the programming.dev community is willing to take that burden if the time ever comes, even though I hope it doesn't. I also wanted to start something similar to a coop, where ownership is shared, meaning users have incentives to make the platform better. I have lots of ideas around this, but this will never be possible on Reddit. It is quite feasible here.
I also had the chance to buy an incredibly dope domain name! https://programming.dev! Why wouldn't I jump at that chance? And I get to even use it instead of let it flounder. So many reasons to host something like this, to build a trusting community, a safe space to have to let people talk about a shared love/topic/hobby.
I already host my own stuff for the most part: emails, DNS, NextCloud, IRC server, IRC client (ZNC, The Lounge), my website and a few other things.
I already pay like $50/mo for a dedicated server so that I have complete control over my data and my digital life, so adding a Lemmy instance to the mix is basically free. Just another VM among many of them, sharing the same resources as the rest of the stuff I host.
I share my server with a few friends, and pretty much my friends and their friends are all free to use my stuff as well. Been doing that for about 14 years at this point: always let my friends put their PHP sites on my server and whatnot. A dozen people using my IRC bouncers, a handful of people on my IRC server. When people need a game server sometimes I hand them out a VM to run the server for a while, then when they're bored I turn it off and shelve it away. It's a lot nicer to foot the cost of a service when it's for people you know and care about.
I'm a FullStack + DevOps engineer as my day job, so it's pretty trivial for me to set up and maintain. If anything it's a bit relaxing compared to the insanity I deal with at work.
Regarding costs, the nice thing with distributed systems like Lemmy is that the average small to medium sized instance is really cheap to run. It's when you run into scaling problems as you grow that becomes painful and often expensive if you can't optimize the system. Suddenly you need way more servers, redundant databases, caching layers, spend a lot of time maintaining all of that, write automation to scale up more easily, etc.
Without federation, the whole ecosystem would go down, it puts a lot of pressure and a lot of need in maintaining reliability and performance. With federation, if my node goes down for a day or two, only a handful of users will complain about it, and all is well.
So in a way, many smaller instances distributes the cost of running the whole fediverse across many more people with much lower cost figures each, something one can afford to pay continuously even without taking in any donations. As I said, it cost me $50 for the whole server, but really I could probably run this on Oracle's free tier forever and never pay a dime for my Lemmy experience.
I host my own because it's cheap, less than 10 dollars per month, and I wanted to contribute to the growth of the Lemmy community.
Also turns out that it's another benefit to this: I don't have to get involved in the entire political debate of who federated with who. I just subscribe to communities I want anywhere.
To have some control over my data and for the fun of it. With money? Selfhosting to me is a hobby and it has also taught me a lot, some of which has been helpful on my career.
I've loved the idea behind Lemmy since I first discovered. At first, I was using lemmy.ml, but then I saw the opportunity to provide a nice space and expand my sysadmin skills. Since there was no Portuguese instance yet, I thought why not create one?
Since then, I've met more people hosting Portuguese services and it has been great :DFor funding, I'm working on two ways: the typical donations and trying to secure support from local FOSS organizations. At the moment, the server costs are not prohibitive and there have been some donations already. I've also been talking to some of those orgs and it's going well :)
I hosted ad-free invision and phpbb forums for almost a decade before the centralized services started. I do it because I like social media and understand the value of a vibrant commons. I've been working with computers since I was a child so hosting yet-another-app-server is not really that big of a deal and gives my users and myself a place we can call home on the internet.
The out-of-pocket cost is minimal for a small instance, for larger instances scaling issues are going to hit eventually and costs will go beyond what 1-person will bear without complaint.
Highly recommend more smaller instances.
My server costs me only about $5 USD a month and I can host thousands of users without much additional effort (my sites before would usually run to ~10k users).
**Tl;dr we do this because we want to, the act itself is often fulfillment. **
I host my own instance for the same reason I self-host the dozens of other services. To have control over my digital services the best I can. I have a few server machines running various services. I run like 40 docker containers running at the moment. Lemmy is a set of those containers.
It cost me the electricity cost to run the server, plus the cost of my internet. I suppose you should include the initial hardware cost- my servers are basically my old gaming rigs. Not to mention the time investment to maintain another service. For me, it's worth it to self-host if I can.
Specifically for lemmy, I seen how overloaded the various major lemmy instances out there were, so self hosting could mean one less user on those instances. I also didn't see any significant drawbacks to self-hosting the instance since I can still join and communicate with all the other communities.
I am already hosting the AI Horde so I'm good with infrastructure. And since lemmy provided an ansible playbook which is my expertise, I thought it would be easy. And it was, even with my using my own loadbalancer solution instead of nginx.
I already had a server I wasn't using much for the AI Horde so I repurposed it. The DB physical I have is really good so I just made it share the DB for lemmy as well.
I pay for it from the same budget which runs on donations. I put a Kofi link on the sidebar and already covered so much of the costs that I sent some of the overflow to lemmy development
In the medium term I’m confident costs could be met using patreon or something similar for large instances.
Plenty of people willingly paid for reddit awards etc. I think most of us feel more loyalty to Lemmy than reddit in the light of recent events.
like many others, I hosted my own for a variety of reasons.
- I like to tinker
- this was a chance to do a lot of tinkering and get in on the "ground-floor" of something I think has a lot of potential
- it gives me a bit more control over the experience, which is helpful when trying to get friends/family to give Lemmy a chance.
As for the cost, I have several VPS's which cost ~$40/year, so the cost is basically negligible.
Here's one perspective: https://runyourown.social/
Personally, I run a Mastodon+Hometown server for around 100 people and it costs me about $30/mo. It costs me more to fill my car's gas tank. I could maybe start a patron or something, but at this stage, it is not even necessary.
About 3 years ago, I was a member of r/ChapoTrapHouse, which got banned from Reddit. The day after this happened, we had over 10,000 people sitting in a lifeboat Discord "server." Within the community, we had the experience and willpower to take Lemmy, kick the tires, make a couple adjustments which were necessary for our community, and make sure we weren't doing malpractice by hosting it. This all happened before Federation had been implemented in Lemmy.
Maintaining the fork was labor intensive, and a lot of the original developers burned out. We couldn't afford wages for development (the site still only exists due to volunteers), but the hosting costs were easily covered by user donations.
I just finished setting up this instance yesterday. I also self host a few other things. Self hosting is fun for me, but probably not most people. I honestly don't know what I'm doing but I'm doing it and it's working lol
I also really enjoy knowing I literally own all my own data. It's stored locally on my personal server. As for cost, I'm just using a mini PC someone in my family gifted to me. It's got some hardware limitations but that's more in theory than practice, but that's because it's only me and a few others who use the server so load is really low.
Since devices that compute generate heat, it is a good way to hear your home up in the PNW. Additionally, you get to host websites. Everyone wins.
Better if you mine crypto, cuz any profit is just extra. You get the same results as if you were using a wall heater but you also get something in return.
I do because I want to control my data and it runs on a VPS that also serves as my email server, amongst other small things. I pay about $20 USD a month which is nothing to keep my data from grubby hands. Though I must admit it was a lot of work getting my mail server running smoothly and it requires some tlc every now and again.
I love playing with computers. That's about it in general.
I've been using Hetzner to get dedicated hosts before and I have had two mediocre servers as a playground for some time now so why not add another service to the stack, arr-I mean yeah
I want my own space in the internet and I set aside money for it monthly from my paychecks
i just installed debian in an old laptop and paid google for a domain for $1 a month ($12/year).
doing it primarily because it seems like a cool thing to mess with and i’ve already learned cool things like DDNS and how to establish free https certificates via “let’s encrypt”. it’s pretty enlightening.
I setup my own instance so that I could have some control over my alias, and pretty much because I can.
You can go a long way with free cloud offerings from both Amazon and Oracle and setup a decent sized instance. I set mine up at a data-center where I manage unrelated services, but I take full advantage of Amazon & Oracle for side projects. DigitalOcean would be another low cost option, as you can run a small lemmy instance on a pretty modest droplet. You'll get the most horsepower from Oracle always free if you can manage to find one of their regions with available resources. (it can be a challenge)
Mostly to test about how activitypub works, also paying out of pocket for $5 a month.
I have a pretty unique domain name and don’t mind the $7 a month to run the instance on AWS. I’m not going to do a ton with it, but I would if there was interest.
Run it on some free or cheap cloud instance https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
Well the bigger ones do take donations, and its working out fine.. you can see the same thing working on other fediverse platforms
I chose to host my own instance for my community because I wanted to be independent from any other instances' administration, federation decisions or any sorts of politics.
Right now I'm paying for it out of my own pocket, but I'm working towards setting up a donation flow.
Because I don't want to be reliant on someone else's servers, plus I can set it up exactly how I want.
As for how I pay for the server, I use a free OCI VPS, so... I don't.
I don't host a lemmy instance yet, but I host other services and I do it mainly for fun. As far as I have read, a small scale lemmy instance runs very well on very low performance hardware, which means the cost of running it is probably less than 10 $ a month.
The big lemmy instances that need better hardware have patreons and other services where people can donate money.
I host my own, and I already have servers for other reasons so there's effectively no extra cost because I can easily handle the load.
The "why" for me is "Why not?" - I wanted to give Lemmy a try, and I enjoy self hosting stuff! I also felt that opening an instance was the best way I could contribute, since my Rust skills are nowhere near good enough to work on Lemmy's backend and frontend was never my cup of tea.
As for how I pay for it, well regardless of whether I ended up running Lemmy or not I already rent two dedicated servers as a way of "keeping up to date" with knowledge that comes in handy for where I work, so I have no intent on dropping them, and certainly not while I work here.
It’s WAY faster than sharing an instance with normies. Think of it as your own personal caching server.
As for payment, you sign up to a VPS provider and give them your credit card, and pay for the usage.
I host my own to act as the sister of my Mastodon instance. It's hard to afford given I'm a student, but it pays off knowing I'm on my little node of the decentralized internet.
It's cheap enough that I can pay for it, and I feel like it's a valuable service to provide.
I have my own just so I can be in more control of things. I just started so haven't done much with it. The server cost is about $12 a month through linode.
