The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience.
Scores are federated, resulting in a consistent global feed across instances and a lack of uniqueness for each instance. I wish hosting an instance provided a more customized experience like this. It would be a great incentive.
Making spez cry
for personal use, main reasons are you won’t have to worry about instance admins making arbitrary decisions that you don’t agree with, and no worries about server overload or downtime.
for making an instance for public, helping fediverse become a more viable alternative by spreading the load over more instances and helping it grow.
But doesn’t one need to federate with all the instances to be visible and view others? Say I’m self-hosting a personal instance that only I use, could I see every post from every instance from the get-go?
No, you only see federated communities that someone on your instance has subscribed to. So at first there is nothing but you can theoretically see every post by subscribing to every community in every instance.
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My reasons are 1-I have total control over my data and don’t ever have to worry about losing my account because of somebody else and 2-Because I just like participating in things like this that I believe in
plus using your own domain is cool
Actually, you’re right. That was also a big reason I did it lol
If you host your own instance you are your own admin. That gives you personal control over content and settings. However, you need to pay for a domain name and you need a 24/7 server so there’s some expense involved. Then there’s maintenance like software updates and user needs if you take them on.
I think most admins take on an instance simply to contribute in building the Fediverse and create something to take some pride in. You get some clout in the community for doing that.
I tried setting up an instance for my personal use today out of curiosity. So far the most notable personal benefits have been much more responsive site and easier time curating what I seeon my feed. The latter is easy enough since my feed only includes posts from communities people on my instance have subscribed to… which is also quite a downside since I’m the only one on the instance…
Oh and I’m able to federate with whomever I want, compared to if I were on lemmy.world, I couldn’t see posts from beehaw.org and vice versa. I’ll also sleep soundly knowing that the stupid pictures I’ll be uploading (too lazy to upload them on external site) won’t be filling up someone else’s precious servers.
How much ballache was it to set up? Docker compose up or much fucking about?
It was… a project. I’m guessing if one has more experience in hosting it would be easier to figure out. I kept running into error after error, but eventually after spending most of the day on it I did somehow get it working… for now.
After all that I open Lemmy and see a post about easy deploy (linked by squid in response to your comment)… So I decided to give it a try and instance was up in minutes without any errors or issues. That was both very nice and very painful to see!
