1. You host it yourself
2. You can get a cool domain name
3. It’s pretty low maintenance

Docker isn’t super necessary, there are some scripts out there that hide a good bit of how it works like the official ansible playbook or lemmy-easy-deploy.

I use docker to easily run many pieces of software in isolation from each other, it’s like VMs if you’re familiar with those, but different in some key ways that don’t really matter for this discussion.

Honestly it depends on what your experience level with running software is and what you want out of it. For me things have been rather smooth sailing as I already host a number of things for myself (so know all about domains, DNS, servers, reverse proxies, docker, etc.) and I am the only one actively using my instance right now so (local or admin-level) moderation isn’t really an issue either.

I am very aware of what it takes to run a small instance, you are indeed correct that domain registration is not the hardest part.

Just run your own instance, I say… that way it’s your fault when you forget to renew the domain name instead of the poor soul running vlemmy.

Agreed, I recommended filtering to only http(s) links in the github issue, I just made this x-post. I don’t see a strong reason to let people link to weird things like file: and data:, or deeplink to installed apps on your computer/phone. Filtering the scheme to just http(s) is how Nutomic seems to have fixed it in the backend from what I can tell (I am not a rust dev).

May the Lord have mercy on us all.

As someone who hosts a bunch of other stuff already including my own email (because I am a madman), does stuff like this as a job, has developer experience, etc. it was simple.

Figuring each of these things out (and how they all work together) for the first time was a hell of a journey.

Asklemmy isn’t really a place to ask about lemmy, it’s for asking general questions to users of lemmy, jut like you wouldn’t ask for Reddit support in /r/askreddit.

Regardless, this question gets asked and talked about in the !selfhosted@lemmy.world community fairly often, here is a (slightly edited) comment I made a while back.

You will need a domain name, you can buy one from a registrar such as hover or namecheap (for the love of all that you consider holy do not use godaddy).

You will need a way to expose the server that you set up via port forwarding or similar on your network.

You will need to set up DNS records on the domain you buy to point to your home IP. You may want to figure out a different way to avoid just handing that information out, cloudflare can help with that. You will want to make sure the DNS records get automatically updated if your IP address changes, which is not uncommon for residential ISPs.

You will need to figure out how to get an SSL certificate, Let’s Encrypt will issue them for free, cloudflare gives you one if you use them as a reverse proxy.

Some of this would likely be easier to do on a cloud provider like digitalocean or linode and could be done reasonably cheaply.

These are all common things for setting up any website, so lemmy docs won’t cover them. In addition to those (this answer was just addressing “how to get a URL”) you will need to install and configure lemmy, lemmy-ui, postgres, and pictrs somewhere (the join-lemmy docs cover this well).

If you want your instance to send emails you will have to figure out how you want to do that (too many options to cover in this answer).

When 0.18.1 gets released if you want captcha you’ll probably have to figure out an mCaptcha provider or set that up yourself.

Not to mention thinking about backups, high availability, etc, etc.

As far as hardware to host on you could get away with like ~$10/mo on most any cloud provider, run it on a Mini-PC in your closet, etc. My instance uses 1-2 GB of RAM, ~13GB of disk (and growing a few hundred MB per day), and ~30% of a CPU (an old i5).

Best of luck.

It is worth noting (assuming we are referring to the same incident) the Mastodon data wasn’t the target of the search, the person just happened to be actively working with a database backup when the FBI executed the warrant and took all of the person’s computers and stuff.

Not sure if it’s relevant as pretending to be form Germany may be the point here, but “Tor clients” aren’t “from” anywhere you can know, that’s just where the exit node is located.

They have been tuning the algorithm for that in the past releases, so may be related to that. Also, there is/was a bug where if you don’t restart lemmy (on the server) regularly stuff will get stuck at the top of hot and/or active.

Is /trees for weed or arborists? Who moderates and decides? You have the same problem on that other site with things like /games vs /gaming vs /gamers vs true_gaming etc.

To me the bigger problem is discoverability. If there is nothing community at /piracy on my local instance something should ve done to show options of communities in the fediverse. Something like an integrated version of browse.feddit.de.

Ah yes, the ~50 year fad of SQL that has already survived its heralded death several times already will go away “because UNIX”. I think the article is a joke, but I can totally imagine certain people arguing this…

I understand that urge, and in my ideal world it would a whole new option of “Suggested” feed rather than a replacement for “All”, like how that other site has a /all but defaults to a more curated selection of content that has broad appeal (and IIRC even some things are excluded from /all over there). For now I’d just take being able to filter the “All” view of the most objectionable stuff that I only want to allow users of my instance to explicitly opt into by seeking out those sorts of places.

Also, unless your instance is purposely seeking out and subscribing to every community in every instance the moment they are created “All” is never going to actually be all posts from everywhere… I imagine larger instances may approach that, but I am certain there is a ton missing from smaller instances like my own.

Yeah, illegal things are sort of an existential threat to any instance, so I will not hesitate to defederate over embracing of and failure to moderate such content at an admin/instance level. That is another one of the rules on my instance.

I think admins can take mod actions on communities on their instance, so they would be able to appoint new mods and do moderation actions in the interim.

Ah, hello fellow DevOp. If I were to apply some of the stuff I do for clients, I’d end up with an AWS bill bigger than my car payment… It’s really neat to see just how far your dollar can go running on a non “Big 3” cloud provider, or even in my homelab. And then weighing that efficiency and limited feature set with availability… fun times

I may not be able to help too specifically with that then as I don’t have any experience with it, but I would still encourage you to do so. One of the helpful folks in !selfhosted@lemmy.world would probably know more about Kbin specifically.

There are a few completely fair points in there calling out what they are legally allowed to do (e.g. they are not directly violating GPL) and are doing (contributing changes back upstream, they claim “always”), that’s about the only “right” this reader found.

Have some quotes that demonstrate the “wrong”:

I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.

Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make.

Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity.