Selfhosted

I just spun up my own instance as well and it does feel a bit like I'm just pulling from the biggest instances and feeding my own without really being able to give much back.

Since Lemmy instance are not backed by commercial interest, but rather by nice volunteers and donors that have money and time to spare, they will be heavily affected by economic downturns (we still can see commercial interests still affect users negatively tho with reddit). Here are my thoughts on the matter:

• as far as I understand the owner of the domain: https://lemmy.world even has to pay for this fancy domain name in the DNS system ... every month subscription service style
  • (and tbh I hate the Domain name system) why should I fund it with my own money?
  • if you hosted with an onion site over tor that expenditure would not exist, but how would users discover your site then? Let me know if you know something about this
• in times of deflation (meaning money becomes worth more, spending some money on a self hosted lemmy instance becomes nonsensical)
• tbh if I hosted a lemmy instance and the users of my instance posted high quality content in quantity I would use it to train my own LLM, that would at least create some economic incentive for me to host such a page ... but managing spam and bots will be HARD

That is why you should always back up your comments on your personal device, would be nice if lemmy had an automated way of doing this (I should look into this more)

I've suggested a routing protocol to the lemmy devs - to use federated instances to route all the messages to other federated instances. The idea was received with some interest, but it seems that people believe that there's still a ton of performance that can be squeezed out from the current architecture through optimisations.

I have my own Lemmy instance running on my home server, but I'm here. "But Bizzle," you may be asking yourself, "why go through all the trouble of configuring your own instance just to wind up on Lemmy.World anyway?"

I'm glad you asked! And the answer is that federation only fetches parent comments. I'm glad Lemmy exists, and I'm going to keep using it, but we need federated sibling comments for this to actually be good, in my opinion.

EDIT: I actually couldn't have been more wrong.

Sounds like you would prefer a peer2peer approach instead of federation? A few years ago, I wrote up why I don’t belief in p2p. In short: It’s too costly and too complex.

you mean do something like blockchain ?

It's a bit worse than that actually. I'm now seeing several communities with exactly the same name that originate on different servers - so clearly Lemmy doesn't have a rule about duplication once you cross a server boundary. That's going to get unwieldy quite fast particularly if, I dunno, "Aww" gets popular on two separate servers at the same time - I guess I'll have to subscribe to both...