I have a domain name that I own but am not making use of and was thinking of setting up my own personal Lemmy instance, partly so I can have a Lemmy id and instance that I can completely control, partly so that I can contribute directly to my hosting cost, and partly because it might be fun to tinker with (or it might just end up being a pain; I’m still trying to figure out which is the case).
However, from this comment it sounds like, rather than contributing to horizontal scaling and easing the load on other servers, I might actually end up increasing the load on other servers by adding yet another server that the other servers have to talk to in order to keep my server updated on the latest comments and posts to which I am subscribed.
So given this, would self-hosting a personal instance actually make things worse for everyone else and thus be an irresponsible action at this time and/or for the foreseeable future? Because the last thing that I want to do is to inadvertently add a burden to the fediverse!
Oh interesting, I’m curious on the answer to this as well.
It’s been said here that accessing content from the large servers via a federation connection is less taxing on the servers than accessing them directly, so there’s that.
I’m thinking this would be the case if your instance had more than 1 user subscribed to that community in the large instance - but if it is just you, wouldn’t it be similar to accessing each instance and viewing the communities there?
No. Operations like removing blocked user comments, tracking your subscriptions themselves (showing only yours when you’re on teh subscription tab), and tracking your sessions are all database heavy operations. You would be trading database heavy operations with “origin needs to send activity pub messages” to you. Activitypub messages were already being generated and is simply just also sent to you… it’s very little network traffic and that’s it.
As long as your instance views most content it receives at least once… you’re well above par for doing your work to lighten the load on the origin server.
As I understand it, there are two kinds of costs that need to be considered: the cost of viewing content, and the cost of receiving content. The first is incurred every time you access your instance and is limited to your instance, whereas the latter is incurred every time something you’ve subscribed to has received an update, and is incurred not only by your instance but also by the server hosting the community. My concern is that, while hosting my own instance would reduce the load on other servers by absorbing the first kind of cost, it would also increase the load on other servers by increasing the second kind of cost.
For my personally, I’m hosting an instance so that I can play with it, but also so that I can test new functionality, and help fix issues.
So I think if you are concerned about being a burden, then actively use your instance for the betterment of lemmy!
The impact either way is minimal, so if it is something you enjoy doing go for it. Maybe it will turn into a slightly larger instance for your friends over time and then it can have a positive impact.
Hey that’s me!
If you’re excited, hop on, as have I! The protocol related scaling issue will resolve itself over time; a few of us are throwing ideas out and hoping some will stick with the developers.
But just bear in mind that you’re not adding to the network scaling because federation on the big servers will not be alleviated by you (or me) having an extra instance.
