The following was asked on a #Mastodon forum on #Reddit - I replied and a sort of converation started. I felt that it wa better to have the discussion where others with valuable inside could chip in so I have- with the OP’s permission posted the following:
For years I have the same question:
Is it useful to create your own Mastodon instance or any other fediverse instance?
Many admins say it is a lot of work and they put a lot of effort, money and energy in it. Some even close their instance after few years, because it is just too much.
After the new political development in the USA, the fediverse got a new wave of interested people from all over the world, but the question stays.
In my opinion it makes only sense if you already have a community, like, if you’re an influencer or part of an NGO or similar projects with several people, who will support you creating and maintaining it with money and own time.
What do you think and do you own an instance or work on one?
If you spin up a Lemmy instance and subscribe to a community, all new posts and comments inside that community will be mirrored to your instance. As I’m subscribed to around 100 different communities, that was a LOT of traffic without me doing anything. That’s why I’ve given up on self-hosting Lemmy just for myself and went back to using lemmy.ml.
However, I do self-host a GoToSocial server just for myself. It’s probably not necessary as mastodon.social isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but if you’re on a smaller instance, it might be worth it. Also, you get to show off your own domain name. And, while other instances may block yours, your content stays online as long as YOU want it to. There’s no way for an external moderator to delete posts on your own server.
People can find you via Boosts from others or by searching for your
@username@domain.com.Maintaining my GoToSocial so far consisted of simply getting WatchTower to update the Docker container. Migration of data to a new version happens automatically. (Well, there was one accident where some pre-release version got released under the
latesttag and I had to use the development branch for a few days … but that was an accident from the GtS-team and shouldn’t happen again.)And that’s my biggest issue w/ Lemmy. It seems to scale okay, provided you have enough users to make all that traffic worthwhile. However, I’m unlikely to actually self-host since I really don’t want a copy of literally everything I sub to. Ideally, I could host my own authentication server and only the communities I host (which would probably be 0), and I’d just fetch whatever I needed from wherever it’s hosted.