Matt

You probably would be, but that depends on the law where the server is hosted. This isn’t a good place for legal advice like that.

What kind of server do you want to host?

Since AP servers both accept incoming connections and make outgoing connections, both sides need valid certificates to do HTTPS.

Good luck getting the server connecting to you to trust it!

I can’t imagine it’d work without a domain, as your instance will need to talk HTTPS with other instances.

It’s something that Linux users have been saying for 20 years and it’s outdated. It makes sense when maybe your computer came with less than a GB of RAM, but these days I usually configure a server with a small amount of swap (like a couple of GB), and I set swappiness to something very low like 5.

I tend to prefer installing Debian on a server, but recently I did install Ubuntu’s recent LTS on a box because I was running into an issue with the latest version of Debian. I didn’t want to revert to an earlier version of Debian or spend a bunch of time figuring out the problem I was having with Python, so I opted to use Ubuntu, which worked.

Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it’s like using the same operating system, as far as I’m concerned.

Yup, I’ve read something similar. Hopefully they’re able to get things sorted out soon!

I’ve not personally noticed any federation issues with Beehaw on my instance. Glad to hear things are better tonight.

I do wish you could federate/sync specific communities to your instance to make searching/subscribing easier.

You mean something that populates your server with a history of posts and comments to communities before your subscribe to them?

It’s hard to say. I don’t know if the admins of Lemmy.ml have been public about their issues or not. I know that Lemmy.world hasn’t been having the same issues, at least from my perspective. Makes me think it’s less an architectural or design problem, but rather a lack of server resources like CPU, as you suggested.

For personal Linux servers, I tend to run Debian or Ubuntu, with a pretty simple “base” setup that I just run through manually in my head.

• Setup my personal account.
• Upload my SSH keys.
• Configure the hostname (usually after something in Star Trek 🖖).
• Configure the /etc/hotss file.
• Make sure it is fully patched.
• Setup ZeroTier.
• Setup Telegraf to ship some metrics.
• Reboot.

I don’t automate any of this because I don’t see a whole of point in doing it.

I’ve had lot of issues with lemmy.ml. I just unsubscribed from everything over there since zero comments were federating over to my instance.

I’m using Linode, and their prices are publicly available.

https://www.linode.com/pricing/

For Mastodon, I’m using the Linode 4 GB while the Lemmy server runs on the Linode 2 GB option. Both are under the Shared CPU pricing – not dedicated.

Thanks, I believe you are correct.

Sendgrid has a free plan, I know, but I believe you’re limited on the number of emails you can send per day.

Same. I’ve never had it screw up before, but the only thing I can imagine is that something’s not right with the keys.

As an aside, I did recently create a new server, and somehow managed to completely ignore the errors in ssh-copy-id. Turns out I forgot to use -m (to create my home directory) in useradd when I went to create my personal account. Oops!

Have you confirmed that the public keys exist on the remote server in your .ssh directory? Are the permissions correct?

I didn’t have this problem with Mastodon, but totally had it with Pixelfed. I don’t think Pixelfed, at least at that time, supported relays. I scraped around pixelfed.social to find people to follow because I had an account there. It didn’t seem possible at the time to see profiles on public servers, without having an account, so it was hard finding people. It was something I was used to do doing on Mastodon. In the end, I didn’t have a positive experience running my own Pixelfed instance, and just decided to use pixelfed.social.

I do follow the developer and he’s been making a lot of great progress. I’ve got the mobile app, and it’s quite decent.

Sure, it would keep the origin from being publicly accessible on the Internet, but you would want to put that server on its own network, anyway.

Basically just the hastle of maintaining and hosting it. My ideal situation would be an instance with a few people, where we can share some of the burden, and perhaps cost. But maybe that has its own headaches when there is a falling out etc.

All very good points. I wouldn’t mind sharing the costs and burden with some folks, but I’m pretty happy just maintaining it myself. Again, for me, it’s something I enjoy doing.

There are also other drawbacks with your own Mastodon instance in terms of discovering new people, as a lot of those tools are geared towards the server scope, and Mastodon prohibits a full index search.

I never really had that problem, but then I started out on other Mastodon instances and just migrated my account around until I ended up on my own personal instance. I also participate in several relays, which helps a lot. In the end, I’ve also spent time looking at the public feeds on other servers and browsing their profiles to find people. Another thing I did was participate in conversations, which was a good way to get mutual followers.

With that being said, I don’t follow a ton of people either. I read my entire timeline, chronologically, so I keep it pretty tailored. I disable boosts and mute/unfollow people often.

I actually don’t know what the Lemmy policy is on indexing, but a way to search the entire Fediverse (or at least large parts of it) would help tremendously in popularizing it, I think. I understand why indexing would be blocked, but that seems a lot like security by obscurity to me, which I don’t think works very well.

Lemmy indexes everything on the server, as far as I know, which means you should be able to find local content and content federated to the instance.