If I were to create a new instance of lemmy do I set up my own server in my house, or am I just creating an instance on one of the lemmy servers?
If I were to create a new instance of lemmy do I set up my own server in my house, or am I just creating an instance on one of the lemmy servers?
There are no “the Lemmy servers”, since there is no central “Lemmy” organization to host and run such servers.
So yeah, you can run it on whatever you can find that has available disk space, CPU cycles, and an Internet connection. Hosted VPS, colocated hardware server, raspberry pi, your gaming rig, AWS containers, whatever.
Brb, taping some PS3’s together.
if only I hadn’t bricked my jailbroken ps3. rust should be able to compile down to ppc64le Linux binaries
Can’t wait for someone to run an instance on a homebrewed DS and see people asking why “lemmy.ds is down all the time??”
Or a Samsung fridge.
The race is open!
Or, to put it in a simple one-liner: Instances are servers.
However you would set up any other server, you set up a Lemmy instance. There is no central datacenter as there would be with a corporate-owned site like Reddit.
Think of it like a bunch of little messages board sites and they automatically import posts from other message board sites - because that’s exactly what it is.
While that’s a bit different to navigate than what we are used to, an instance (aka a server) going down or becoming hostile and being defederated only removes that one server from the network.
It’s similar to how IRC networks function; except with those, the server owners decide what servers they link up with. With Lemmy (and other ActivityPub based services), the users decide (by subscribing). Instance admins can block (“defederate”) other instances though.