Is it just up-front cost? I understand that for larger instances because they’d have to setup heftier systems, but even micro-instances seem to rent cloud compute when they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.
Edit: I understand that self-hosting is a skill that takes years to learn, and I’m aware that the vast majority of people on Earth choose to spend their time and energy investing into completely different topics. However, Lemmy tends to attract the techy type, so I suppose I just assumed the ratio of self-hosters-to-not would be higher. I’m not saying it’s trivial, just that I presume more Lemmings know how to do it than, say, Redditors (taking total users into account ofc)
I simply just can’t afford a server to actually run it currently.
Fair
Fantastic! No notes.
I appreciate the refresher. Thanks for sharing the link!
…Of course.
it’s difficult and dangerous
Most people don’t know how to self-host. Most people don’t know what self-hosting is. Most people don’t know what hosting is.
This post is a prime example of a weird logical fallacy that seems to permeate the tech world in particular, and which goes something like this:
- For me, this task is trivial.
- That is because I have spent a lifetime developing the knowledge, skills and experience to make that task trivial.
- I lack the self-awareness and intellectual honesty to understand that.
- Therefore, I assume that anyone for whom this task is not trivial is simply lazy, and has only themselves to blame for their failure to perform this task.
- Therefore, I am very superior and very smart.
To add between 2. and 3.: I choose to spend my limited time and energy on managing self-hosted infrastructure rather than on other hobbies or life demands.
Tbf it is a hobbby 😂
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Most people don’t make their own furniture, clothes, or ingredients either. It’s difficult, time-consuming, and requires a significant up-front (and ongoing) investment of money and of specialized knowledge that most people have neither the time nor care to deal with while managing the rest or their life.
Risk of attackers getting on your la(w)n and ISP issues like no public IP I guess
Yeah, probably for the same reason few people sew their own t-shirts, knit their pullovers and repair the plumbing and electrical work in their house by themselves.
I self-host Mastodon on a cheap VPS. It’s kind of a hassle. Just recently I found it running out of disk space because I followed an account that auto-boosts a lot of media. It was like 50gb per day of media cache. I unfollowed that account.
That’s a minor problem that didn’t even involve malicious activity. I’m going to keep self-hosting, but I have no trouble understanding why someone wouldn’t want the hassle.
Because they don’t know how? It’s not like most people are exposed to tech beyond mainstream apps, email, Word and maybe Excel. And quite frankly even as someone who does know how and who could afford dedicated hardware, I still can’t be bothered. It’s just not how I want to spend my time or money.
And that’s not even getting into potential security and liability issues.
Specifically for Piefed/Lemmy, I have all the experience and knowledge necessary to self host my own instance. I’ve been managing servers since before half of Lemmy’s population was born. And what it has taught me, is it is always better when its is someone else’s problem. My home lemmy instance closed down, which could have been a chance for me to self host, but I, instead, spent a little time finding another instance I liked, because I didn’t want to be responsible for it.
I actually own a domain with the idea of starting a Piefed and Mastodon instance, but I’ve never been willing to set it up and deal with the overhead. Maybe one day I’ll decide to, especially if feddit.online ever goes offline, but for now, I enjoy it being someone else’s problem.
Also, I’m pretty sure the fediverse wouldn’t work if everyone had an instance of 1. Maybe some day someone will crack a fully distributed P2P ActivityPub like solution, but until then, the health of the swarm requires we stay somewhere between “1 company runs everything” and “there are 7 billion fediverse instances”.
I’m not a developer. I don’t code. So when it comes to building my own local infrastructure from scratch and maintaining it like it’s not a full time job… all with enough security as to not fuck up my local home network… I don’t know man…. It’s easier to stay out of it and just have some drives and a tv.
To make an apple pie from scratch you must first create the universe
Same reason a lot of people don’t change their own oil in their vehicles.
Sometimes it’s just more convenient to pay someone else to do things
Oh wait you’re talking about fediverse instances. For me, I would be worried about reliability. Like if I was travelling and my apartment had a power outage or something
I would love to but the main issue is I don’t have motivation, the time to learn, or the money to set it up the way I’d like. I can’t even get a pihole running atm, despite trying. I once had a server on my old desktop but couldn’t even take the time to rip all my movies to Jellyfin. I’m also concerned about having all my stuff in one location (and if that’s the same with a corp then that doesn’t change with me self hosting 😬). I would love it for privacy but there’s a few options that are convenient and supposedly secure enough that I am willing to make the trust compromise. I would really like to own my router or set up that pihole though, but see first sentence :/
I self host a cheap VPS but my main worry is keeping it secure and locked down. I’m not a security expert so while I use it to store and share files I don’t upload anything personal to it.
I self host a Nextcloud instance at home but it isn’t accessible from outside my local network. I want to keep it as secure as possible. I back up the files to three different mediums every couple of days and I think that’s the part a lot of non techie people might struggle with.
My wife’s doesn’t understand tech at all so if anything happens to me, she can unplug the storage box and plug it into a windows box via usb, giving her easy access to all the files. Anything more complicated than that and it’ll never work.
I host my own Lemmy instance, but only because I spent the last 3 years learning to host other stuff. It’s taken a lot of effort and time to figure it all out and get it working, and the only reason I bothered was because it interested me. Most people aren’t that interested in how it all works and just want to use a working thing.
