Lemdit Official

I don't mind at all.

I love the idea of self-hosted services in general. It's a fun hobby and hosting things that other people find useful makes me feel like I'm giving something back. Privacy is also something that is important to me on principle.

Before Lemmy I used to host a few public alternative front-ends for major platforms, such as Invidious for YouTube, Nitter for Twitter, or Libreddit for Reddit, etc. I've never been a massive Reddit user, in fact I never had a registered account, but I used Libreddit quite a bit. The changes Reddit was making to its API were also going to kill Libreddit, which is how I became aware of it.

Reddit was not alone in their crackdown either. YouTube recently threatened the devs of Invidious with legal action, Nitter is being chipped away at by Musk's changes (but somehow keeps getting resurrected), etc. Alternative front-ends, while a very ingenious way to evade the dystopian tracking on these platforms, are a losing battle unfortunately. Federated services have the promise of something new entirely.

So I looked into Lemmy and it appeals to me a lot more than Mastodon ever did. I think it's a format that works well as a federated platform (growing pains notwithstanding). So I decided to ditch my alternative privacy front ends and go all in on making the Fediverse work for everyone, in whatever small way I can.

So that's how Lemdit was born. I already had the servers, the fast connectivity and the know-how, so it felt like the right thing to do.

My investment into Lemdit is mostly my time and effort, it otherwise doesn't cost me very much to run. This makes Lemdit fairly sustainable, since I'm not fighting an ever increasing hosting bill every month like most other instances that host via VPS - this post explains more about our setup if you're curious: https://lemdit.com/post/13