Hello, with the spicy beehaw drama I was wondering, would it be possible to selfhost a lemmy instance literally just for yourself and no one else to like, circumvent any defederation shenanigans? As all instances federate per default, this should work right?

Allthough, as far as my understanding of how federation works is that I would need to manually subscribe to every community on every instance that I’m interested in as federation only syncs communities that have at least one subscriber on the hosting instance, correct?

Or is there a way to subscribe to EVERYTHING?

Other than that is there any obvious downside to doing that?

  • Kichae@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    When people say “instances federate by default”, they don’t mean the instances engage in active content discovery. They mean the default behaviour when someone goes to look for content that’s offsite is to connect to the remote instance.

    Running a solo Lemmy or kbin instance puts all of the responsibility of content discovery on your own shoulders. You’ll need to go out and scout other instances to see what you want to follow, and then subscribe to those sources in order to keep content flowing.

    I highly recommend having a secondary account that you use to subscribe to things somewhat indiscriminately so you can separate out your subscribed feed from your all feed in a meaningful way.

    • dichtbringer@kbin.socialOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      This is a good idea, use one account just to sub everything so syncing works and I can use “all” and “subsribed” seperatly, very good idea. Do you know if there is an easy way to “subscribe to everything”? Like a script or something?

      • Kichae@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        Not that I’m aware of. But you can get a list of active group-hosting fediverse sites here: https://fediverse.observer/list From there, you can find the list of groups found on each site and decide what you’d like to subscribe to. I’m sure you could scrape them and build a bot with a little Python or something, if you have any experience with that.

    • NotSteve_@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      Beehaw is defederating from sh.itjustwor.ks and Lemmy.world.Personally I think it’s silly to be upset over it considering defederation is one of the selling points of Lemmy.

      Beehaw is just going for a more curated experience which I think is completely fine. I’m sure once they have more moderators they’ll consider refederating anyway.

      • polygon@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        It’s definitely an interesting selling point. I’ve always said you have to take the good with the bad on social media, but having independent instances who can curate things a bit means you don’t actually have to take the bad if you don’t want. Even though the Beehaw admin themselves said this is essentially a nuke and not how they’d preferred to have handled it (Lemmy doesn’t have the tools just yet to do it any other way) it’s still interesting and unique in social media.

        Beehaw is creating an identity for themselves and sticking to it, rather than being a general instance. Some people will love that, some will hate it. But ultimately it’s whats going to make Beehaw a unique place to be for those who want it without taking anything away from those who don’t. This is all still early stages for Lemmy and there are growing pains for sure, but this sort of thing, to me at least, shows the possibilities of a Federated network.

  • martin_uieafa@feddit.de
    2·
    1 year ago

    Other than that is there any obvious downside to doing that?

    You must be able to administrate and pay for a server.
    Apart from that, it would not be nice to participate in the network and use the computing capacity of others, but not bring any infrastructure into the network yourself (by registration lock).

    • TooL@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      But if you are pulling all the data to your instance by subscribing, wouldn’t this actually alleviate some of the load on the original instance? Obviously not as much as if you were hosting the content yourself, but still moreso than if you were directly interfacing with their instance?

      Or am I completely wrong there. I don’t have a firm grasp of how content stored/cached between instances.

    • Lilkev@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      So, if I already have a server in my house, I could theoretically spin up a Lemmy or kbin instance solely for myself?

    • BootlegHermit@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      It’s not really all that difficult to spin up your own “server”. Sure, desktop hardware isn’t exactly targeted towards running a web server, but for a purpose like your own Lemmy/federation, I’d imagine just about any old hardware from the last 5 years or so oughta be fine.

      • martin_uieafa@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        To me, the desktop hardware note sounds like you want to host the instance at home. In that case you need a suitable router, a static IP address or a DNS service, besides your own domain.

      • TooL@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        Lol that’s a big yikes. Glad I never managed to make an account over at beehaw.

        • jherazob@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          It was simply a moderation issue, the two instances in question were giving them a lot of moderation work, and lacking Mastodon’s “limit” option they decided to just defederate them until things settle down a bit, remember that this is all volunteers in their spare time, not employees of a corporation

        • curiosityLynx@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          It’s just temporary until mod tools mature enough to deal with the trolls that were using lemmy.world’s open registration and automated registration approval to quickly evade bans and troll beehaw.

  • Salamander@mander.xyz
    1·
    1 year ago

    That’s perfectly fine!

    Some downsides can be that you will pay a monthly fee to rent a server, or expose your home network to the internet (some risk, but for a personal instance the risk is not so high). With regards to how the federation works, you can use your instance to interact with other instances that use open federation (the default) without problem. I don’t think that there is a way to subscribe to EVERYTHING. I have to manually fetch communities and subscribe to them to help populate my instance.

  • jherazob@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    There’s already multiple instances of only one user for very similar reasons, so yeah, if that’s what you want you can do it today

  • ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    I believe an instance can whitelist which would block all other instances and only allow ones it approves. I don’t know of one that does that yet, but I could see beehaw doing that in the future—in which case, having a solo instance would not help.

  • Spzi@lemmy.click
    1·
    1 year ago

    There is one instance dedicated to mimicking /r/all: https://lemmy.directory/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/New/page/1

    Check it out. Maybe it partially does what you want, maybe you can learn from them how to subscribe to everything.

    would it be possible to selfhost a lemmy instance literally just for yourself and no one else to like, circumvent any defederation shenanigans?

    I can imagine many people want a fully federated instance, myself included. Maybe I did not understand the value of defederation, but I think I can decide for myself to what communities I subscribe, or not.

    So I do see value in an instance dedicated to not defederating anything, ever. Maybe it even already exists (please let me know). I tried to suggest you can share the instance with others, just make the policy perfectly clear.

  • Banda@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been curious about this also but for a different reason. I assume all my posts and comments are hosted at the instance I’m subscribed to. Should that server go down away for any reason my account and all its data would be lost right? I’d rather be in control of keeping my own data safe.

    • asjmcguire@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      There was an excellent post about this today that I saw. Essentially it’s like this:

      There is an original community, and then there are mirror copies.

      So if you post a comment via your server to a community that is actually hosted on kbin.social for example, you are posting a comment to the mirror of that community (on your local instance), which then sends the comment out to the actual original community, which then federates your comment out to all instances that are mirroring that community.

  • Repulsa@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been thinking the same. Going to look up some guides later on to see how much of a hassle it would be.

    I think when I looked at doing it with Mastodon, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze for a single user (this was months ago so might be different now) but Lemmy might be better suited.