Is it just up-front cost? I understand that for larger instances because they’d have to setup heftier systems, but even micro-instances seem to rent cloud compute when they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.
Edit: I understand that self-hosting is a skill that takes years to learn, and I’m aware that the vast majority of people on Earth choose to spend their time and energy investing into completely different topics. However, Lemmy tends to attract the techy type, so I suppose I just assumed the ratio of self-hosters-to-not would be higher. I’m not saying it’s trivial, just that I presume more Lemmings know how to do it than, say, Redditors (taking total users into account ofc)
Most people don’t know how to self-host. Most people don’t know what self-hosting is. Most people don’t know what hosting is.
This post is a prime example of a weird logical fallacy that seems to permeate the tech world in particular, and which goes something like this:
- For me, this task is trivial.
- That is because I have spent a lifetime developing the knowledge, skills and experience to make that task trivial.
- I lack the self-awareness and intellectual honesty to understand that.
- Therefore, I assume that anyone for whom this task is not trivial is simply lazy, and has only themselves to blame for their failure to perform this task.
- Therefore, I am very superior and very smart.
To add between 2. and 3.: I choose to spend my limited time and energy on managing self-hosted infrastructure rather than on other hobbies or life demands.
Tbf it is a hobbby 😂
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…Of course.
Fantastic! No notes.
I appreciate the refresher. Thanks for sharing the link!
it’s difficult and dangerous
Most people are answering the title question but is your question about why people use a VPS or paid server for a Lemmy instance instance of hosting at home?
Content is federated in. My home server is not a good place to keep unknown images, videos, and links to other content. The risks associated with hosting user content are the main reason for using a data centre instead of home hosting.
There are also other benefits like complete separation from my personal hosted services that are actually hosted from home, and privacy and security reasons. As an example, my home hosted services are not available from outside my country, which virtually eliminates the malicious vulnerability scanning bots that constantly hit the domain before I added that limitation. But you can’t have that limitation for a federated service or it wouldn’t be able to federate. I have this country restriction on my router as part of the port forwarding rules.
But mostly it’s that first thing about the user generated content.
The risks associated with hosting user content are the main reason for using a data centre instead of home hosting.
Is the legal liability actually different? Wouldn’t you still be equally responsible for what’s on your VPS, since you control it?
Legally? I’m not sure.
But if I had to explain to a jury, I’d sure rather have “the social media site’s server was in a data centre and hosted user content” as the explanation instead of trying to explain to laypeople “yes the material was on a computer in my house but akshully a computer and a server are the same thing, and there’s this concept among people online about hosting your own internet services” and so on.
Most people don’t make their own furniture, clothes, or ingredients either. It’s difficult, time-consuming, and requires a significant up-front (and ongoing) investment of money and of specialized knowledge that most people have neither the time nor care to deal with while managing the rest or their life.
Specifically for Piefed/Lemmy, I have all the experience and knowledge necessary to self host my own instance. I’ve been managing servers since before half of Lemmy’s population was born. And what it has taught me, is it is always better when its is someone else’s problem. My home lemmy instance closed down, which could have been a chance for me to self host, but I, instead, spent a little time finding another instance I liked, because I didn’t want to be responsible for it.
I actually own a domain with the idea of starting a Piefed and Mastodon instance, but I’ve never been willing to set it up and deal with the overhead. Maybe one day I’ll decide to, especially if feddit.online ever goes offline, but for now, I enjoy it being someone else’s problem.
Also, I’m pretty sure the fediverse wouldn’t work if everyone had an instance of 1. Maybe some day someone will crack a fully distributed P2P ActivityPub like solution, but until then, the health of the swarm requires we stay somewhere between “1 company runs everything” and “there are 7 billion fediverse instances”.
Im sorry, is this a real question? Honestly, I cant help but feel like youre still in high school. This is such a self obsessed question its hurting my head.
This is like asking “Why doesnt everyone just learn roman numeral analysis and use the progression i-VI-III-VII to write a song that people like?” Its a deeply niche knowledge base/skill.
If youre asking this in earnest, do some deep reflection on how distinct and varied human experience is. The answer is that people have different skills and interests and your lived experience has nothing to do with other people’s lives.
I get where you’re coming from but this is a pretty full on response isn’t it? I work in a technical organisation and plenty there don’t do it despite having the skill set. I assume this is more the framing of the question not “why doesn’t the average granny who worked as a teacher her whole life self-host?”
Fair point and well made at that. Full on can be appropriate. This community has an unearned superiority complex. With that in mind, I stand by the full on-ness.
I self-host Mastodon on a cheap VPS. It’s kind of a hassle. Just recently I found it running out of disk space because I followed an account that auto-boosts a lot of media. It was like 50gb per day of media cache. I unfollowed that account.
That’s a minor problem that didn’t even involve malicious activity. I’m going to keep self-hosting, but I have no trouble understanding why someone wouldn’t want the hassle.
Yeah, probably for the same reason few people sew their own t-shirts, knit their pullovers and repair the plumbing and electrical work in their house by themselves.
I’m not a developer. I don’t code. So when it comes to building my own local infrastructure from scratch and maintaining it like it’s not a full time job… all with enough security as to not fuck up my local home network… I don’t know man…. It’s easier to stay out of it and just have some drives and a tv.
Risk of attackers getting on your la(w)n and ISP issues like no public IP I guess
It’s expensive. Sure you can start off with an old laptop, but soon you’ll want external storage to hold more images/media.
Then you’ll realize that if you just got a dedicated mini-pc you could host more containers. Oh! What if you get multiple identical PCs and then you cluster them for HA/zero downtime maintenance?!
Shit, but then you would need more than the little integrated 4 port switch on your Netgear router.
No matter! Switch to a virtualized pfsense, ditch the Netgear router and go for a 12 port switch.
Smash cut to a few years later when you’re spec’ing fiber switches/SFP+ for 10Gbps and Proxmox nodes with an extra 4GB ram so your ceph cluster doesn’t fall over randomly… Wait, why is my electric bill now $400/mo?
I’ve been seriously considering downgrading my homelab, but at this point between the *arr stack and Immich, I’m not sure if I can.
I agree more people should self host.
Disclaimer: I’m fediverse developer myself of Mbin. And also host all my services and websites.
Because they don’t know how? It’s not like most people are exposed to tech beyond mainstream apps, email, Word and maybe Excel. And quite frankly even as someone who does know how and who could afford dedicated hardware, I still can’t be bothered. It’s just not how I want to spend my time or money.
And that’s not even getting into potential security and liability issues.
Same reason a lot of people don’t change their own oil in their vehicles.
Sometimes it’s just more convenient to pay someone else to do things
Oh wait you’re talking about fediverse instances. For me, I would be worried about reliability. Like if I was travelling and my apartment had a power outage or something
It costs money, I don’t have time for that, I don’t want to take care of the security, I have other things to do.
they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.
Yep, everything I said earlier.
