• 2 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Even when running an instance for yourself, you’re not really safe. The threat to your privacy goes from being a third party in control of your data to your own operational inexperience.

    I tried to host my own personal Lemmy instance and ran into a lot of issues hosting it. On the one hand you want to be safe by restricting unnecessary access, but on the other hand you have no idea why federation doesn’t work, or the postfix-relay docker cannot send an email, or why you cannot ssh into your own host, so you want to just allow everything and just get it to work somehow. In the end, unless you are already an expert at this stuff, trying to host your personal instance safely is a tall task.

    It’s also going to be very costly. Especially for an image sharing website like Pixelfed.

    Maybe there is a market for self-service managed hosts like we have with Wordpress blogs.












  • The apps are already amazing and will not suffer issues of scale themselves because they run on users’ devices. The scaling issues will be in Lemmy server code and ActivityPub in general.

    ActivityPub doesn’t seem very scalable IMHO. It works well if all instances are about the same size and communities are well-distributed. Right now a few servers like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ml are much larger than others. They host most of the popular communities as well. This creates an imbalance which ActivityPub doesn’t handle well.

    I think Lemmy instances should be topic based. But that’d be confusing for people coming from centralized social media who are only trying to find a reliable starting place. So I really hope we reach a point of maturity and mainstream-ness of Fediverse that people feel comfortable with smaller theme-based instances.