Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

  • dart@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    On the flip side, it’s more expensive

    Can you go into more detail on this?

    • Matt@netmonkey.tech
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      1 year ago

      Sure.

      I run my own instance at a cloud provider, and thus have monthly expenses I wouldn’t normally incur, if I were using a public instance.

      • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net
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        1 year ago

        The fun part is that you can run it on the same server as your mastodon is already running with no additional costs.

      • dart@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Oh, gotcha. I guess if using a personal local server, then the only recurring cost would be electricity.

        • Matt@netmonkey.tech
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          1 year ago

          Yes, there is electricity.

          I think Internet connectivity could also be an issue, unless you have an ISP that’s friendly to you running a publicly accessible server on your Internet connection at home.

          • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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            1 year ago

            Could you run a local server on your desktop that you only turn on whenever as a client? I don’t really understand the Fediverse’s architecture yet, but as far as I saw instances being down are not a big problem beyond not being able to log in if it’s your home instance, and communities fracturing to separate discussions in other instances’ local federation caches that only get resynced when the thing comes back up.

            What prevents me from running my own instance as a very heavy client? Discounting the public DNS + static globally routable IP part as those can be solved IMO.

            • Matt@netmonkey.tech
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              1 year ago

              I’ve wondered that myself, and I don’t know, to be honest, but there are some issues you’d certainly encounter. For example, if you posted any media it would need to be somewhere “always on” or remote instances and users might not be able to see it unless they managed to cache it on time. It means that your posts URLs wouldn’t be accessible, and would only be available on servers to which it has already federated. There may be other issues, too, such as queues only keeping undelivered messages for so long, etc.

              I’m sure someone with a good understanding of ActivityPub could explain whether or not this is possible.

            • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net
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              1 year ago

              Yes you could, but if your instance is down often, it might be that there is some timeout in ActivityPub when your instance will be marked as gone for others and might not get new content once it is up again.