I feel like over the past few months, the main thing preventing me from getting super active in the fediverse has been all of the drama surrounding federation and instances shutting down.

I just want to be able to turn my brain off, and not have to think “Will this instance be around in 6 months?” every time I post.

As a result, I’ve been thinking about creating a Lemmy and/or Mastodon instance that is literally just me and no one else. No communities or anything, simply me posting to other instances via this private instance. And I know that this instance will stay alive and federated for as long as I keep hosting it.

However before I go through the effort of setting these up, I want to know what people think about private instances. Is this bad taste? Is it a logistical nightmare? Have people done this before? And what would the hardware requirements for a 1 user instance look like?

  • @TheFogan
    1•1 year ago

    I mean short and long term there’s pros and cons to that. however there’s a reason why that started to fall appart with e-mail. In short if it gets popular, than hosting servers with no throttling or post limits means spammers are going to go crazy, and rather than play the never ending unwinnable whack a mole game as bad actors create thousands of instances a day, hosts of any instances worth targetting will have to do a “instances are assumed malicious until proven benign”, (IE a whitelist method)