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Should I host my own instance if I don't intend to run a community? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

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[–] 4 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years 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.

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