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Why do people host Lemmy instances and how do they pay for them? (lemm.ee)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 18 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

I'm selfhosting my instance for fun and not for profit. I'm using a server on Hetzner that costs me 4.11/mo. I'm the only active user of my instance, but I like to own my own data and selfhost my own services.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    My point is that sure while it's new and shiny everyone wants to try it out but I think over time people will get bored with self hosting lemmy and move onto other things. I might setup my own on a free tier VPS or something because that's a thing for some reason, let Amazon Microsoft or oracle pay for it lol

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Wait till someone builds a narrow AI just to maintain and update a server. The ability to conveniëntly self host services with a single installer is going to become a new commodity to sell next to freemium/subscription corporate services

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Do i really need a dns sever if i am the only user? I am fine using my ip adress. I know a dns also enables https certification but i am my own network admin so do I really need it? My only concern is bad actors breaking into my server trough a vulnerability.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Do you mean a domain name? If so, I am 99% sure that federation (so your instance communicating with other instances) requires https, which would require you to use a domain name.

    If you just wanted to run an isolated/private instance, then a domain name wouldn't be required.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    This is correct. Other servers will not connect with you if you don’t have a valid certificate.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Damned.

    How is it independent if we rely on a dns service? When do we start building a decentralized dns network? /halfS (i will search if one exists after this comment and if not il see if duckdns is still free)

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Decentralized DNS (DNS servers that is) as a concept doesn't really work, we have centralized DNS and Certificate Authorities in order to establish a chain of trust, for better or for worse. Otherwise, there is no way for me to say, claim that I'm google.com or some other big domain.

    And really that's just from a security standpoint. DNS also serves as a glorified phone book for the internet - but if everyone tries to make their own phone book and there was no centralized copy to refer to, you (or rather your computers/devices/etc) wouldn't even begin to know where to begin looking up google.com . Even if I wanted to advertise myself as google.com, without some sort of centralized solution there is no one to "advertise" to in the first place, if that makes sense.

    I think at least for the foreseeable future we're going to be always tied to centralized DNS, unless we want to have something like key signing parties for domain names - and even then, I still don't even think that'd work unless every device on the planet goes to the "same party" and everyone promises to have a unique domain name somehow... and a way to trust that the first "person" we find to be "advertising" their domain is actually the proper owner of the domain, in which case we're pretty much right back to centralized DNS.

    Hopefully that all makes at least a bit of sense, I've just woken up so I'm not 100% here yet haha.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Good morning, Thanks for your explanation. I am curious towards your phone book analogy because a phone book is like a ledger of information and creating a decentralized ledger is the main tech behind blockchain (which ive always understood as being more about the technological promise rather then virtual currencies). In my personal theory having a blockchain adress book of domain names sounds realistic. Is the problem that it would only work for those connected to it (so completely seperate from the current internet) or is there another technical challenge.

    Ive found handshake which is supposedly backwards compatible with current dns system but it uses a p2p system and coins to vore: https://handshake.org/ What are your thoughts on it?

    Also good night. Cause while you just woke up i’ve been delaying to go to bed.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Have a good night!

    In my personal theory having a blockchain adress book of domain names sounds realistic. Is the problem that it would only work for those connected to it (so completely seperate from the current internet) or is there another technical challenge.

    Well, while I normally tend to have a kneejerk visceral reaction to blockchain tech these days, this looks to be something that would actually make sense/benefit from a blockchain based system. I'm certainly intrigued by it, but a couple of issues I can already think of:

    • From a user perspective: As you'd mentioned, it would rely on people being connected to it already, and people already have a very difficult time with the onboarding process of Lemmy

    • From a developer perspective: You'd most likely need some sort of library to handle communicating over this protocol, since none of the major (or at this point, I'd assume any of the) operating systems won't support this natively. This means that not only does the server side of Lemmy need something to handle this, but any client-side apps (whether on PC or mobile) would also need a way to handle speaking over this protocol

    • From a server admin perspective: I'm not too sure about this one, but I wonder what the resource usage would look like for a protocol like this? Right now, its very easy for instance admins to just pickup say a $5/very cheap VPS from and get up and running. I feel like the resource overhead of the protocol alone would make this a bit more difficult to get started. That's just my guess though.

    So handshake definitely looks interesting in general, but unless it really takes off and becomes incredibly mainstream (which I'd love to see - I'm all for decentralized tech) I think it would only result in more negatives than positives.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    over time people will get bored with self hosting lemmy and move onto other things

    I wouldn't worry about that. At the same time, new people join lemmy. Most as users, but some as admins, and even a few as developers. At the moment, I believe the increase in new servers is way more capacity than we need for new users.

    Looking around this thread made me happy (thanks for creating it!). It seems many people host for very admirable reasons, sometimes explicitly unselfish. I am grateful for this and totally fine when one of those people decides to step down for whatever reasons. It's all part of the beauty of freedom.

    From a user's point of view, one might worry that users could be forced to move when an instance shuts down. Happened to me. Not great, but a piece of cake compared to migrating from another platform.

    For statistical reasons, we can probably assume that most users will end up in stable instances with very few to zero moves.

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