Matt

I do wish you could federate/sync specific communities to your instance to make searching/subscribing easier.

You mean something that populates your server with a history of posts and comments to communities before your subscribe to them?

You’re talking about Lemmy, right?

I provisioned an Ubuntu 22.02 server at Linode. I chose their 2 GB Shared CPU instance type. Once I configured the server to my liking, I ran through the Lemmy-Ansible instructions. (They have other methods, so check the documentation.)

Essentially, you install Ansible on your workstation. I’m on macOS and installed it via Homebrew. You then download their git repository, create the necessary configuration files, and then have Ansible configure the server. It was fairly simple.

Yeah, if you’ve got a decent amount of Linux experience, I don’t think you’ll have any issues. Mastodon’s installation is well-documented and works. My only criticism is that it’s a bit long and you have to be careful not to miss anything.

On the other hand, I recall installing Pixelfed back several months ago and having a difficult time. The documentation was lacking, and it required me to use Arch Linux, which I had never used. I was able to get it working, but eventually terminated the instance after a while because I was never using it.

That’s awesome! Running my own social media instances has become a hobby for me.

Having my own Lemmy instance has felt fairly seamless versus using Lemmy.world, but there have been some kinks. For example, when attempting to subscribe to a new community, the server has to pull a bunch of data first. This takes several seconds, but the UI simply says “not found” – and then after several seconds, the UI updates with the community you want to follow. I figured this out by tailing the logs.

Also, the installation was pretty damn easy, especially when compared to Mastodon.

What might make you want to ditch your self-hosted Mastodon instance?

With Lemmy, I didn’t feel a need to pick any specific instance because I can follow communities from anywhere, and it seems to work pretty well.

One downside I’ve encountered with my own Lemmy instance is that post and comment history in the communities I follow begins when I started following them on my new instance. New posts and comments are federated my way, going forward, but I don’t have the ability to go back and view as much history as one would on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, for example.

I think it’s a matter of personal preference.

I’ve been running my own Mastodon instance for several months now, and I’ve enjoyed it. I don’t have to rely on someone else, either, which is nice. I’m in control of everything on that instance.

As for Lemmy, I just started my own instance today, and am currently writing you from it. What made me decide to setup my own instance was some performance issues I was seeing with Lemmy.world, although that might have been an UI problem. Anyway, I enjoy doing this stuff, so I’m running my own instance for the sake of doing it.

On the flip side, it’s more expensive and time consuming, and I’m the one who has to worry about backing up data, etc. Like I said, though, I enjoy doing it, so it’s no big deal.