this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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At this point I'm considering it. I wonder how much it costs.
I did it, but my buddy has a server with extra resources that he doesn't care if I use and I already owned domains.
Say $20/yr for domain, Lemmy needs around 150MB of RAM and almost no CPU. You could easily do that for $5/mo. Slice up the domain renewal, call it $8.
So far, there are upsides and downsides.
The upsides, I can federate with anyone I want and it's unlikely that they'll defederate with me because I'm one guy, and maybe a handful of friends if they want accounts. Two, I wanted something I could use as a blog anyway, so I made a mod only community on my instance where I can blog. I don't care if people read it or not, it just seemed fun.
Downside, finding communities is relatively more laborious. I have to go to other instances and look at their communities, or all feeds, to find things to subscribe to at home. Which means for each one, I need to copy the link or name, go to my instance's search, then go to the communities tab and subscribe. On a big instance, someone probably already searched for a lot of communities at least once, which is enough to index it. But on your own, you gotta do it yourself and it can get a little tedious.
Overall, I'm liking running my own though, so I plan to keep doing that.
Discoverability is one of the biggest weaknesses Lemmy has right now. It should be entirely fixable, though. A way to auto-index the list of communities on a given instance would be a great start.
Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.
I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.
Doing it in a federated way.
Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community and that sucks.
I can completely understand why that wouldn't be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.
I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.
*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.
Last I checked there were 10k communities and a few hundred instances total, which is tiny in computer terms. As it grows larger maybe it would be an issue, but really even millions of instance names properly compressed shouldn't be onerous for a one-time download.