I selfhost several things for personal/family use on my own hardware. I couldn’t get Lemmy working behind Traefik which is what I use as a reverse proxy.

So I decided to go get a cheap VPS, and since it was kinda overkill for a one person Lemmy instance, and the fact that it wasn’t on my home network, I decided I might as well let other people use it too. I’ll probably cap user count at some point if necessary unless I could get donations to cover higher costs.

And anyway I think even a one person instance on a home network was probably a bad idea. I expose some of my services through a reverse proxy but they’re not advertised or known to the public like Lemmy would be, federating and plastering my URL next to all of my comments.