Most people don't know how to self-host. Most people don't know what self-hosting is. Most people don't know what hosting is.

This post is a prime example of a weird logical fallacy that seems to permeate the tech world in particular, and which goes something like this:

1. For me, this task is trivial.
2. That is because I have spent a lifetime developing the knowledge, skills and experience to make that task trivial.
3. I lack the self-awareness and intellectual honesty to understand that.
4. Therefore, I assume that anyone for whom this task is not trivial is simply lazy, and has only themselves to blame for their failure to perform this task.
5. Therefore, I am very superior and very smart.

Most people don't make their own furniture, clothes, or ingredients either. It's difficult, time-consuming, and requires a significant up-front (and ongoing) investment of money and of specialized knowledge that most people have neither the time nor care to deal with while managing the rest or their life.

Specifically for Piefed/Lemmy, I have all the experience and knowledge necessary to self host my own instance. I've been managing servers since before half of Lemmy's population was born. And what it has taught me, is it is always better when its is someone else's problem. My home lemmy instance closed down, which could have been a chance for me to self host, but I, instead, spent a little time finding another instance I liked, because I didn't want to be responsible for it.

I actually own a domain with the idea of starting a Piefed and Mastodon instance, but I've never been willing to set it up and deal with the overhead. Maybe one day I'll decide to, especially if feddit.online ever goes offline, but for now, I enjoy it being someone else's problem.

Also, I'm pretty sure the fediverse wouldn't work if everyone had an instance of 1. Maybe some day someone will crack a fully distributed P2P ActivityPub like solution, but until then, the health of the swarm requires we stay somewhere between "1 company runs everything" and "there are 7 billion fediverse instances".

Most people are answering the title question but is your question about why people use a VPS or paid server for a Lemmy instance instance of hosting at home?

Content is federated in. My home server is not a good place to keep unknown images, videos, and links to other content. The risks associated with hosting user content are the main reason for using a data centre instead of home hosting.

There are also other benefits like complete separation from my personal hosted services that are actually hosted from home, and privacy and security reasons. As an example, my home hosted services are not available from outside my country, which virtually eliminates the malicious vulnerability scanning bots that constantly hit the domain before I added that limitation. But you can't have that limitation for a federated service or it wouldn't be able to federate. I have this country restriction on my router as part of the port forwarding rules.

But mostly it's that first thing about the user generated content.

Im sorry, is this a real question? Honestly, I cant help but feel like youre still in high school. This is such a self obsessed question its hurting my head.

This is like asking "Why doesnt everyone just learn roman numeral analysis and use the progression i-VI-III-VII to write a song that people like?" Its a deeply niche knowledge base/skill.

If youre asking this in earnest, do some deep reflection on how distinct and varied human experience is. The answer is that people have different skills and interests and your lived experience has nothing to do with other people's lives.

I self-host Mastodon on a cheap VPS. It's kind of a hassle. Just recently I found it running out of disk space because I followed an account that auto-boosts a lot of media. It was like 50gb per day of media cache. I unfollowed that account.

That's a minor problem that didn't even involve malicious activity. I'm going to keep self-hosting, but I have no trouble understanding why someone wouldn't want the hassle.

Yeah, probably for the same reason few people sew their own t-shirts, knit their pullovers and repair the plumbing and electrical work in their house by themselves.

Risk of attackers getting on your la(w)n and ISP issues like no public IP I guess

I’m not a developer. I don’t code. So when it comes to building my own local infrastructure from scratch and maintaining it like it’s not a full time job… all with enough security as to not fuck up my local home network… I don’t know man…. It’s easier to stay out of it and just have some drives and a tv.

Because they don't know how? It's not like most people are exposed to tech beyond mainstream apps, email, Word and maybe Excel. And quite frankly even as someone who does know how and who could afford dedicated hardware, I still can't be bothered. It's just not how I want to spend my time or money.

And that's not even getting into potential security and liability issues.

It's expensive. Sure you can start off with an old laptop, but soon you'll want external storage to hold more images/media.

Then you'll realize that if you just got a dedicated mini-pc you could host more containers. Oh! What if you get multiple identical PCs and then you cluster them for HA/zero downtime maintenance?!

Shit, but then you would need more than the little integrated 4 port switch on your Netgear router.

No matter! Switch to a virtualized pfsense, ditch the Netgear router and go for a 12 port switch.

Smash cut to a few years later when you're spec'ing fiber switches/SFP+ for 10Gbps and Proxmox nodes with an extra 4GB ram so your ceph cluster doesn't fall over randomly... Wait, why is my electric bill now $400/mo?

I've been seriously considering downgrading my homelab, but at this point between the *arr stack and Immich, I'm not sure if I can.

I would love to but the main issue is I don’t have motivation, the time to learn, or the money to set it up the way I’d like. I can’t even get a pihole running atm, despite trying. I once had a server on my old desktop but couldn’t even take the time to rip all my movies to Jellyfin. I’m also concerned about having all my stuff in one location (and if that’s the same with a corp then that doesn’t change with me self hosting 😬). I would love it for privacy but there’s a few options that are convenient and supposedly secure enough that I am willing to make the trust compromise. I would really like to own my router or set up that pihole though, but see first sentence :/

I agree more people should self host.

Disclaimer: I'm fediverse developer myself of Mbin. And also host all my services and websites.

Same reason a lot of people don't change their own oil in their vehicles.

Sometimes it's just more convenient to pay someone else to do things

Oh wait you're talking about fediverse instances. For me, I would be worried about reliability. Like if I was travelling and my apartment had a power outage or something

It costs money, I don't have time for that, I don't want to take care of the security, I have other things to do.

they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.

Yep, everything I said earlier.

I host my own Lemmy instance, but only because I spent the last 3 years learning to host other stuff. It's taken a lot of effort and time to figure it all out and get it working, and the only reason I bothered was because it interested me. Most people aren't that interested in how it all works and just want to use a working thing.

To make an apple pie from scratch you must first create the universe

The lack of knowledge, which others here already pointed out, is only one part of it. I have a knowledge due to my education and work, but I really don't want to. I selfhost the stuff, that I use personally and locally and access it through a VPN. But a ActivityPup Server, that would need to be reachable from outside, I really dont want to bother with.

Just doing a port-forwarding, like you suggested, is not a great idea security-wise, if you dont take additional precautions. You'd probably want the publicly hosted stuff in a completely different subnet from your LAN, that all your other devices use. Or at least have VLANs setup. All of which is not easily possible, or even impossible, with the standard consumer networking hardware most have at home.

Additionally, you'd need to take care of system and application updates, backups and so on, which takes a significant amount of time.

All in all I really don't care enough about social media in general to justify the hassle.

The "port forwading" thing is probably the biggest challenge. There is no "single tutorial" on how to do port forwarding. Some routers don't even have a setting for it. And most people probably don't have a public static IP, and I've seen provider fees that are so high that it's cheaper to get a VPS instead.

And additionally, even if you manage the port forwarding, it is still some additional risk to host a public service on your own personal LAN.

I self host a cheap VPS but my main worry is keeping it secure and locked down. I’m not a security expert so while I use it to store and share files I don’t upload anything personal to it.

I self host a Nextcloud instance at home but it isn’t accessible from outside my local network. I want to keep it as secure as possible. I back up the files to three different mediums every couple of days and I think that’s the part a lot of non techie people might struggle with.

My wife’s doesn’t understand tech at all so if anything happens to me, she can unplug the storage box and plug it into a windows box via usb, giving her easy access to all the files. Anything more complicated than that and it’ll never work.

I've always wanted to... For me the problems are 1) I'm behind a CGNAT, 2) my ISP explicitly disallows hosting in their terms, and 3) I can't afford a VPS.

A lot of people here are saying that it’s difficult and takes a lot of time and money to get started. It doesn’t. I learned how in just a few days, and I’ve been hosting everything on this shitty computer from 20 years ago that I got for free.

Seriously, it took me just a few days to go from absolutely zero knowledge about self hosting to get about 80% of what I know now, the other 20 is just neat tips and tricks I’ve learned in the past year and a half that have made the experience smoother.

Now, I host almost every service I use, the only exceptions being YouTube and steam, and other general forums for when I look things up.

Up front cost and maintenance time is the one that really gets you as things age and software packages get retired or require systemic updates that break other things in the system. Containerization helps a lot but isn’t perfect.

Because it isnt easy. Because very few people enjoy reading error logs. Because convenience is a thing.

I don't know if anyone's told this to you before, but IT related things do not appeal to even half of people. Less than a quarter for sure.

We're the strange ones. As confrontational to logic as that might sound. We as self hosters are in no way representative of the general population.

I thought about it just as a local county wide area. Then I realized that hardly anyone outside of nerds knows what lemmy is, let alone reddit.

I plan on hosting my own mumble server when Discord shits the bed. I'm just having a private one for all my friends.

I think some people just don't like talking or boasting about their setups for security reasons 🤷‍♂️

The power cost isnt worth running a server 24/7. I dont want to invest in redundancy or storage space for a social media site. I dont want to have my account linked directly to my home ip for privacy and security reasons. I'd rather use pooled resources from the local instance and donate $20 every now n then.

most do not have enough knowledge about it to even know what that means and would also lack interest as whatever they already do works for them

I thought about setting up my own personal instance, but I didn’t want to have to deal moderate any CSAM.

One may not have the hardware on hand to self-host for the more demanding stuff like video hosting ala PeerTube or OwnCast. Like, you could host a static blog on an ancient PC using the LGA775 or AM2 socket, but something like PeerTube or OwnCast would ideally need something with graphics that can encode modern video codecs.

I thought about it for a year or two, expecting to need to buy stuff. I had no idea, until I asked here, that am old laptop is enough. Not than enough to start.

It's easy, and can be free. And that what I needed to hear before I got started.