Jamie

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.

There is an advantage that Lemmy's backend is entirely an API with a detached frontend. There are already API wrappers for Rust and Typescript that are officially supported, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone writes a robust automod that can be implemented for communities that desire one.

I have a bit of interest in doing it, but I know nothing about the API itself, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to grab every new thing submitted to a community or instance for moderation.

Still a better user experience than the official Reddit app.

losing out on the 12 cent per user per month they are normally getting

An article I read yesterday has him saying it's 3%. Plus, spez has a history of dishonesty, and he only comes out about it if he gets caught. Seems like the number of 3rd party users fluctuates with whatever point he wants to make.

Oh, people are mad? It's only 3% guys, it's just a small fraction.

But they're costing us so much money! We're losing out on 12% of our userbase!

Which one is it? 12 or 3?

There is https://lemmyverse.net/ as an alternative, I don't see any immediately shady communities in the top of the listing. Though it does put lemmy.ml as #1, which isn't ideal since it'd probably draw a lot of people right to it.

I would say MediaWiki is one of the most painless web installs I've used. Put it in a directory with the right permissions, give it a database, and you're basically done. If you want to configure things in a custom way or add plugins, that might take longer than the actual install.

But for a barebones wiki? Really painless.

As much as there are, very valid, concerns about friction and effort of entry I believe that negative is part of what’s making this era so positive.

I would say that's not far from what the old internet had going for it. Heck, even old Reddit. There are tons of posts about how good Reddit once was, but isn't anymore because it got big. I think there's just something about a huge section of the populous being in the same place all at once that makes people bitter towards each other.