Lemmy

Personally I think it's a great idea. I run my own instance even though I'm the only user and have no communities.

Pros:

Moderation: Your own moderation capabilities. It's your choice what you see or don't see.

Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don't have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.

Performance: Generally speaking you'll have better performance. You won't have to worry about an influx of new users taking the instance down due to overloads.

Cons:

Domain: You need your own domain, which is an ongoing cost.

Hosting: Like the domain, you need to pay for hosting to run Lemmy. You could try running it at home, but I would not recommend it.

Management: Depending on how you setup Lemmy, there will probably be ongoing maintenance work. It might not be worth the hassle when you can just use a third party instance and let them deal with it.

Ultimately it's up to you.

I personally haven't had any issues with doing so! I run a few instances of different software in the Fediverse:

• Matrix
• Mastodon
• PeerTube
• Lemmy

Of them all, I found that Lemmy and Matrix were the easiest to "get into" due to the fact that its incredibly easy to subscribe to a remote community, and instantly be able to see posts from that community. Same principal with Matrix as well! I even went ahead and put up my Lemmy instance on a domain that wasn't directly tied to my name so that others could have an account as well (Whereas for example, I wouldn't really expect someone to want a @username:russ.network handle for Matrix, other than myself).

This is exactly what I have been doing. I enjoy this way of interacting with Fedi.

Pros:

• No reliance on the charity of others.
• Refresh as many times as you want without worrying about server load.
• Decide exactly which apps to host, and how they look and feel.

Cons:

• Hosting costs money/time.
• Interacting with remote instances is sometimes a little more work as you have to copy URLs and paste them in your search, and you're less likely to have already fetched content because of other users subscribing to these remote instances.

Generally interacting with other instances works just fine. Especially on Mastodon I hardly ever notice I'm on a single user instance. Lemmy because of its different style of application (e.g. it's more common to link to posts) presents empty posts a bit more often but I hope a bit more proactive fetching of remote content can be added at some point.

Hosting your own instances may not be for everyone but it is for me, and I can recommend it.

One nice thing is you can always access lemmy as long as your server is up. lemmy.ml has been down a bit recently and although never for too long, I can access all the posts and comments that have already been made on the lemmy.ml communities I'm subscribed to and also other instances, like beehaw.org. And I don't know how much of an issue this is now, but if lemmy.ml gets an image upload size limit, if you host your own instance you can upload as big images as you want (there's a bit of a bug with that but still).

Something that hasn't been mentioned yet: sometimes an instance blocks another, but you may still want to see and reply to their users in a community used by both instances. Having your own instance gives you more control over which instances to federate and block, if there isn't an instance which is already aligned with your attitudes.

Moderating remote communities is a bit buggy and obviously you can't create new communities on remote servers.

Normal usage is pretty much ok though.

I think a con that I’m realizing (running my own instance) is I’m pretty much posting into the void until other instances federate with me. My understanding is I cannot post to a community on an instance where I do not have an account.

This is what I'm doing, so far I've got a few threads from other instances where the comments haven't been fetched, and it's a bit of a pain to have to manually add communities you want to subscribe to. Still worth it though imo, it's fun to have my own server.

I'm wondering the same. I assume you have control over the domain name so you can further customize your username but not sure what else there is to it.

One related question I have about this: How much ongoing storage would one expect for this kind of instance? My understanding is that the fediverse is push-based, so if I run my own instance that means that all communities I subscribe to are pushing updates to my instance which presumably get stored in a database somewhere. It seems like that could really add up to a lot of data.

I run my own instance... Only for me.

It runs on s 2-core VM beside ejabberd and matrix-synapse.

You can follow each community you want, and create Communities, others can follow.

Just do it.