• flashgnash@lemm.eeOP
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    1 year ago

    As far as I understand it currently people host their own Lemmy instances just for the hell of it or out of the goodness of their heart

    But the larger instances will end up costing more money and I’m doubtful that will be sustainable with no income

  • snowe@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I started !programming.dev because I am a moderator of several 100k+ subs over on Reddit and I didn’t want my communities to not have a place to go if Reddit crashed and burned (even though it’s incredibly unlikely). The main sub I moderated (/r/ExperiencedDevs) for years wanted user verification to combat the spam that was newbies commenting and posting about things they didn’t really know or understand. This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn’t really care about their communities.

    I am also a strong supporter of pulling control away from megacorps. We need more small to medium sized businesses on the planet.

    For selfish reasons? I wanted to work on something new and have true ownership over it, the ability to build a community that worked together to build something without capitalism standing in the way. It might seem strange, but one of the first things I did was bring multiple other people on board to help me maintain the server, even going so far as to add domain managers to the domain name. This was all to counter the major questions people were asking around “what if the host decides they don’t want to host anymore?”. Well hopefully the programming.dev community is willing to take that burden if the time ever comes, even though I hope it doesn’t. I also wanted to start something similar to a coop, where ownership is shared, meaning users have incentives to make the platform better. I have lots of ideas around this, but this will never be possible on Reddit. It is quite feasible here.

    I also had the chance to buy an incredibly dope domain name! https://programming.dev! Why wouldn’t I jump at that chance? And I get to even use it instead of let it flounder. So many reasons to host something like this, to build a trusting community, a safe space to have to let people talk about a shared love/topic/hobby.

  • sunaurus@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I really like the overall concept of Lemmy, so I decided to set up lemm.ee to support the Lemmy network with my skillset. I have previously had the privilege of being responsible for running large platforms online (end-to-end, everything from operations to software engineering), and so far, this experience seems to be extremely relevant for running Lemmy in its current state.

    As for paying for hosting, my initial plan was to to just pay for everything myself as kind of a hobby, but the userbase at lemm.ee has been very gracious in first asking me several times to share costs, and then actually sending money once I set up donations. I’m not sure yet if this donations-based funding will be sustainable, or if it will fall off after the initial hype dies, but for now it’s really awesome to see that there are several other people who believe in lemm.ee and want to share financial responsibility for it.

  • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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    1 year ago

    I decided to host my own because I was on lemmy.world and we got blocked by beehaw, which had many of the communities I wanted to be a part of. I run mine on a server that’s in my house, so the only thing I’m paying for is electricity. And I have solar panels.

      • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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        1 year ago

        It was really annoying to set up if I’m being honest. If I hadn’t taken classes on Docker, I would have never figured it out. Luckily they have been improving the process recently. It already much easier now than it was a week ago. Hopefully by the next major release it is easy peasy.

  • imgprojts@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Since devices that compute generate heat, it is a good way to hear your home up in the PNW. Additionally, you get to host websites. Everyone wins.

    Better if you mine crypto, cuz any profit is just extra. You get the same results as if you were using a wall heater but you also get something in return.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Also (in theory) you can stick a VPN in front of it to hide your home IP to prevent DDoS attacks etc.

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Right but if you’re using a mini split you’ll get much greater efficiency for the heat.

  • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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    1 year ago

    I host my own. Specifically for myself and those who are friends or friends of friends.

    I have a cluster of servers operating in my garage. Free real-estate for tons of stuff I want to host. I have to “pay” for electricity… the rest was already paid for long ago. My electricity cost for my whole cluster… is an estimated $1750 a year. But that cluster is 160 CPU cores, 750 GB of RAM, and ~400TB of storage. You ain’t getting that on a cloud hosted provider for $145 a month. About $110 of that is subsidized by my business operations. I host email, websites, nextcloud, plex, etc… boatloads of stuff.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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        1 year ago

        I actually do… Yes… I have dual internet connections, dedicated power off both phases of my electricity with ~5 hours of battery backup, run redundant internal infrastructure (power, network, and server hardware)… I also have a massive backup library and am currently working on obtaining offsite backups solution. The whole site/house is also monitored with cameras.

        I have better uptime than some datacenters in my area have which I can truthfully quantify that as I also hold a CIO/CISO position in another company that operates out of a major Datacenter in my area.

        Edit: Should clarify, an offsite backup solution that ISN’T “just peer with backblaze or some other provider” to store your backups. I intend to do a rotating tape library. With one set of tapes always being off site.

        Also to mention… I have better uptime than AWS-east at this point of the year… Although there will be some outages of my infrastructure here soon for a network hardware update. I suspect something in the order of about 1 minute of downtime total.