Hi everyone,
I’ve been wondering about legal implications of self-hosting Lemmy. Isn’t it universally required in many countries to moderate the content that you host publicly? What happens when someone posts something illegal on your instance and you don’t won’t to bother with being a mod and just enjoy the technical aspects of it?
Would love to hear your thoughts on this!
You can set your instance to private and close registrations, which is what I am doing. That way you can use it only for yourself and a few friends and still be connected to the fediverse. The communities that you make on your self-hosted instance wouldn’t be connected, though.
What’s the benefit of doing this apart from a technical challenge and fun? Such a server wouldn’t support the network in any way, right?
Well, as you mentioned before it’s to enjoy the “technical aspect”, which could be many reasons. For one, if the instance you signed up on shuts down there goes your account with it. I feel better self-hosting because I am in control of when/if it shuts down.
I’ve actually been playing with this idea myself! Is it hard to set up/manage?
It was super easy. I just edited the config file in the Ansible playbook and needed to edit the certbot task because I use Cloudflare but other than that it was a breeze.
One of the devs mentioned that the biggest draw on server resources is the direct web interaction, and loading pages, not the behind-the-scenes federation, where the database queries are simpler and the actions can be queued up and retried as needed. (I think apps would have the same issue since the server’s going to be doing the same kind of massive database queries to build your feed.)
If your comment takes a few minutes to get from your home server to another one when the site’s overloaded, it’s not a huge deal, but if your comment takes a few minutes to get from your browser to your server, the site’s basically down.
So moving yourself to a new server takes over the entire real-time load you would have been using, and the additional background load of sending threads to/from your server is a lot smaller.