1y ago

Fediverse questions I couldn't find the answer anywhere

I joined the fediverse like 2 weeks ago. I'm trying to find the answers to all my doubts reading discussions around, watching videos etc, but there are still some questions I'm looking an answer for. Here they are:

Is having a own hosted server a suggested practice? I could see some benefits, like not having to worry about which instance to join or having the full control of your own account. Furthermore, it's maybe more "professional"? Like @myname@mycustomdomain is maybe better than @myname@lemmy.world ? I don't know, I'm asking.
What are the server costs to keep an instance alive? I know it depends on the amount of users and -I think- the bandwidth used, but what's a common range of the costs per year, just to have a rough idea? (Like 50/100€ per year?)
What managing an instance involves? I'm not talking about a self hosted instance now, I'm referring to a medium/big instance with many users and communities. I'm asking this question to better comprehend what are the difficulties the owner/owners of an instance may face and so what could make them shut down the instance in the long term.
What happens exactly to an account when the instance in which it is registered shuts down? Is the account lost? It can still be migrated to a different instance?
What exactly change in my user experience if I decide to migrate to a different instance? I potentially see less contents? It just changes the posts I see in the "local" page?

10 comments

I can't answer them all but I'll try the ones I can as a solo/small instance
I don't know about suggested, but I'm someone who likes to tinker and look behind the scenes a little so that's why I made my own instance, plus being in control of everything. Also having my name @va11halla.bar is pretty cool

The account is gone, no migration. Part of why I made my own instance is because my old was deleted. Due to federation you can still find content you posted at least, assuming it was federated beforehand
You'll have to federate everything yourself if its your own instance. The all tab takes into account the subscriptions of everyone on the instance, so you'll see a lot less if you have a lot less users on your instance. The local tab takes in to account communities on that instance only.

I'd say the suggested practice is going with smaller instances (i.e. anything that isn't lemmy.ml or even worse lemmy.world). But sure, if you want to spin up a custom instance that would be even better. You'd have the advantage of being able to customize your experience a lot more (changing themes, editing the code to fix stuff you don't like, managing your own emojis...)
I'd say around 10€ a month. My instance pays around that (maybe a little more, can't remember) and we have over 100 users. It's really not that expensive.
You become a mega janny. You have to draft server wide rules, appoint mods and make sure they don't screw up by letting banned content through. Depending on your country's laws and where your instance is hosted, you might risk hosting illegal stuff for which you as an admin would be liable.
Others have already replied to 4. and 5. so I'm not going to make this wall of text any longer.

I can only answer 4 and 5. At least based on my knowledge voming from mastodon ,which should mirror here.
Yep, your account is lost, no way to access it. It is common for instances of appropriate size to tell the users that they are shutting down thus giving people time to migrate. Accounts on mastodon can migrate at least, which carries over your followers to the new account but not your post and messages. Don't really know about migration on lemmy though, last time I checked it is not currently a feature and I don't see much purpose since people don't have followers and there is no karma. Instances probably will announce if they are shutting down for archiving purposes or just common courtesy.
Local changes as you said. What you see can vary slightly, for example if your instance blocks other instances or users you won't be able to see the content submitted by those blocked, be it posts or comments even if they are on other servers. Alternatively your new instance could be blocked by some and thus altering the content slightly.

Up to you, I would just avoid big instances like .world or .ml. People do congregate on big instances in most of the fediverse, so IDK that "professional" enters into it. It's not as if you're running a law firm on a @hotmail email address. I like hosting stuff for myself, so I am running my own instance.
For yourself you could get away with spending around $5-$10/mo, plus ~$10/yr for the domain name. More users/load would need more resources, .world is spending >$150/mo for the server(s) alone, and that will only grow as the instance grows.
Big thing would be site-wide moderation and managing federation. Dealing with reports, illegal content, communities that break server rules, users that are harassing others, etc. If you slack too much on that (or have overly lax policies) you may end up defederated by instances. Making the decision to defederate other instances. Etc.
Entirely gone.
Mostly just changes what you'd see on local. Federation can be wonky/slow at times, but that is true of federation between big instances as well, it's just something you have to get used to when using Lemmy.

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