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Made a post on r/ModCoord yesterday why mods should keep their subs closed no matter what. it reached the top of the sub then it got removed lol
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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I maintained a fairly neutral position (as a mod) while the blackout was starting, but I'm slipping more and more into the Lemmy rabbit hole. First it was getting my own instance running, but now things are starting to take shape and it's actually a lot of fun trying to keep up with both the server hosting and community building. Plus, everyone here has strong small-Internet-town vibes, which makes interacting with people much more enjoyable than on Reddit. My goal is to get my instance self-funded through donations, but I'm more than happy to keep paying for hosting in the interim. People who talk about Lemmy not being a "viable alternative" probably say so because they don't get it.
I am surprised I never hear of people running it from old desktops or such. A fibre internet connection and a old desktop is gonna be faster than the cheaper tiers of online hosting. This is especially true if you say upgraded your desktop in the last couple if years and kept the old parts like I did.
Biggest cost then would be electric. Older PC, probably...70 watts. So about 600kWh/year. Maybe about between $60-$150 per year.
Much cheaper than any hosting I know and bandwidth costs are absorbed into your monthly bill.
The real risk would be hardware failure. Hopefully you'll have backups or a user base that won't care if the instance goes offline for quite a while.
There's also a risk of unexpected security vulnerabilities letting an attacker compromise your public facing machine to get into your home network if you don't have it physically firewalled off.
Personally, I'll just let someone else deal with all the hosting issues. I'd rather donate if they requested than deal with all of that indefinitely.
There are a lot of genuine reasons people don't self-host from home, including, but not limited to: a) chance of security issues from firewall misconfiguration, b) mediocre speeds and intermittent service for people who don't have symmetric fiber connections, c) chance of security issues from RCE/shell access/XSS, especially bad if the server is not not properly isolated from the rest of the LAN, and d) TOS violations leading to disruptions in service (it's against the TOS for FiOS, for example, to host web-facing servers). If you're confident in your home labbing skills, are security-conscious, have a good connection, and know you won't tick anyone off, you're probably fine. For the rest of us, paying for VPS hosting is a lot cheaper than a zero-day screwing over your entire network, or an innocent mistake out of inexperience opening up major holes in your router firewall. You obviously get much cheaper hosting, but you also inherit a lot more to worry about in the process.