What are the pros and cons? For someone who has zero IT background so ELI5.
You should not.
Multiple Lemmy instances exist so that a single entity cannot control everything that happens across the federated Lemmyverse. Each instance can make its own rules.
As it stands there are more than enough instances, I believe with differing policies and rules. As such, you should not start a Lemmy instance.
If you have no IT background at all, I wouldn’t recommend it. You should understand the basics first.
If you’re talking about a community instance that strangers can join, it’s mostly about volunteering and feeling like you’re contributing to something.
If you’re talking about running one for you alone, or you and friends or family, then it’s mostly about controlling your experience. You control when there are updates, you control what version you run, you know who has your data, it’s you. You know no one’s doing anything bad with it, because it’s you. If there’s something bugging you and someone else wrote a patch to fix it, you can deploy that. Or if there’s some setting to enable or disable a feature for the whole instance, you can set it to your preference.
The cons are that it’s you. If it goes down because something broke or got corrupted, it doesn’t come back later on its own. You do it. If your database poops the bed and eats all your data, then did you have backups? Were they kept on a different disk than the corrupted one? Because if not then your data is now gone. A new version came out! When does the upgrade happen? When you make time to do it. Maybe there’s manual migration steps you need to do, maybe you need to change some new settings, you should probably make a backup in case you have to roll back… How did you know there was a new version out? How do you know if there’s some critical bug or security flaw you need to fix? You have to subscribe to the community, essentially.
Maybe you subscribe to a lot of busy photo communities and then one day lemmy is down for you. Weird… the box won’t turn on. Oh, the disk is at 100%. Shit, did you not have a monitor that checks disk usage and emails you when it’s getting full? Oops…
From what I understand:
Pros of hosting your own instance:
- control over your data (privacy)
- performance (your instance is probably less busy/faster than lemmy.world, because it has to handle less people, so things load faster)
- it cool
Cons of hosting your own instance):
- maintenance
- federation cost increases for the network (i.e. All instances that host communities you are subscribed to (i.e. Lemmy.world), now need to send (federation) updates to your new instance). Note that as more people start using your instance, it is better for the network.
- you have to have a server running somewhere, which costs money’s.
- you need a max 20 character domain name.
you need a max 20 character domain name
Sounds kinda arbitrary, what’s the reason for this?
I remember reading that somewhere, but now I can’t find it back… May or may not be true
Thank you all. You are all right that it would be an awful idea for me to start one but I was interested in learning a bit more about why someone would do so. This is very enlightening.
Like the other comments have said, it’s probably not worth your time to bother. As to why you might want to start one:
- you’re finding the instance your on is too slow
- you want more control over which instances you’re federated with
- you like to tinker
- you want to build a meta-community that has its own identity
If you have no skill at all in IT why are you contemplating spinning up a Lemmy instance?
The first Lemmy instance I joined was setup by someone like that, lasted two days then fell over.
Besides what everyone said… you are the boss. You control what can and can’t be done.
Eg. Lemmy.ml decided that users can’t create communities anymore on that instance. Easily solvable but a limitation to that instance.
If you own the instance, you decide what can be done and what not.
