I think it’s worth mentioning the amount of instances full of bots as well. I just started hosting my own instance and decided to check other instances’ block lists to defederate from at least some bot instances. I now have about 50 blocked instances. (instances with 60k or so users each with no posts)
I’m still waiting for the promised new can that isn’t impossible to recycle…
Thanks for the tip! I thought something like this probably exists, but didn’t have energy to look it up after the installation fatigue. I’m not quite yet decided whether I want to add communities manually or automate it, I’ll probably first see whether I’ll add a couple of friends to the instance or not, and what they might think.
Even if I don’t add anyone to the instance, using All as a type of custom feed would be an option too, adding communities more liberally than I would for Subscribed… Perhaps the way Lemmy does this isn’t as bad as I first thought!
It was… a project. I’m guessing if one has more experience in hosting it would be easier to figure out. I kept running into error after error, but eventually after spending most of the day on it I did somehow get it working… for now.
After all that I open Lemmy and see a post about easy deploy (linked by squid in response to your comment)… So I decided to give it a try and instance was up in minutes without any errors or issues. That was both very nice and very painful to see!
I tried setting up an instance for my personal use today out of curiosity. So far the most notable personal benefits have been much more responsive site and easier time curating what I seeon my feed. The latter is easy enough since my feed only includes posts from communities people on my instance have subscribed to… which is also quite a downside since I’m the only one on the instance…
Oh and I’m able to federate with whomever I want, compared to if I were on lemmy.world, I couldn’t see posts from beehaw.org and vice versa. I’ll also sleep soundly knowing that the stupid pictures I’ll be uploading (too lazy to upload them on external site) won’t be filling up someone else’s precious servers.
One thing that might not be obvious is that the All feed is different too, as it only shows posts from communities someone on the instance has subscribed to. But since there are ways to search communities across instances, it isn’t really a big deal. Unless you’re on an instance of one or two people maybe.
Federation and moderation are probably where the instance matters most. Also, the matter of who runs the instance is kind of important considering stability and longevity of the instance. (mine for example will probably be gone within a month once I break something)