this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Selfhosted

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Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sure, one could do that, but I prefer to keep things separate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 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.