I have a domain name that I own but am not making use of and was thinking of setting up my own personal Lemmy instance, partly so I can have a Lemmy id and instance that I can completely control, partly so that I can contribute directly to my hosting cost, and partly because it might be fun to tinker with (or it might just end up being a pain; I’m still trying to figure out which is the case).
However, from this comment it sounds like, rather than contributing to horizontal scaling and easing the load on other servers, I might actually end up increasing the load on other servers by adding yet another server that the other servers have to talk to in order to keep my server updated on the latest comments and posts to which I am subscribed.
So given this, would self-hosting a personal instance actually make things worse for everyone else and thus be an irresponsible action at this time and/or for the foreseeable future? Because the last thing that I want to do is to inadvertently add a burden to the fediverse!
Great question, glad you asked. When I joined Lemmy a week or so ago, a post from the lead developer that was stickied for a while specifically mentioned adding instances was helpful to help take the burden off of the main flagship instances of the time like Lemmy dot ml.
What you can also do to assuage your concerns is invite other users to your instance so you share some economy of scale, and try to spearhead some community you have a personal interest in so you’re also contributing content from your server. We do that with [email protected] for example.