So, as any self-respecting datahoarder and selfhoster, I have my server rack populated with a few machines, churning along as they tend to my hobby-related projects. Now that I’ve started using Lemmy I’m toying with the idea of selfhosting an instance, as I have both the hardware, bandwidth, and skillset for it.
So my question is: Are there any advantages to it? And other than time and resources, what are the downsides?
Upsides:
Downsides:
Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It’s not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you’re actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.
But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin’ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don’t read.
These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default… So you’re more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot’s docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you’re getting into.
Additionally it’s going to cause you headaches if your server is low spec. The federation queue is not well optimized for GIGANTIC subscription counts like this. There is an active draft PR working on it, but using that script is still a bad idea.
Commenting to vouch for lcs. It works well and isn’t resource heavy
To be frank, this liability risk exists even in well-moderated communities as it only takes one rogue poster/commenter to “contaminate” your own instance…
Liability is not binary. There is a qualitative change in risk as you transition from “I subscribed to 100 actively moderated communities that I read and am familiar with” toward “I subscribed to everything there is including the worst of the worst and I didn’t realize I was doing so and don’t look at the results”.
Also, moderation activities federate. So even if a rogue poster does “contaminate” the actively moderated communities on a well-admin’ed instance… when those mods and admins delete the offending material they’ll automatically cleanup your instance as well. As a result, it’s the creepy crawly communities that don’t clean up or don’t want to clean up that generate the lion’s share of risk.
Is it 100% safe to sub to well-moderated communities, no. You have to know your local laws and protect yourself. Do you do yourself favors by running lemmony? Also no. These two statements can be simultaneously true.
Thank you for this!
Another possible downside is a lack of an administrative toolchain. Hopefully one should be forthcoming soon. My database may end up growing huge.