I’ve been into computers since around the mid 70s. First one was an Altair 8000. I have been selfhosting for years now, self taught and helped along of course by the selfhosting communities.

Not to speak bad of the dead, but I’ve really had it up to my back teeth with their bullshit. So I am in search of some self hosting brethren to chum around with. I figured I’d give Lemmy a try. It’s kind of confusing, but hopefully I can wrap my 70 year old head around it.

I’ve seen a few selfhost forum around the fediverse but they all seem to have been abandoned with threads a year or more old, and no movement. So my question, is there a thriving selfhost/homelab type place that is active? Perhaps one of you good souls could point me in the right direction.

Is there any benefit to hosting your own Lemmy and mesh it with the other Lemmey’s out there? What benefit would that be? From what I understand, hosting your own instance turns out to just be your own personal blog.

I mean, I understand the fediverse, and decentralization, I’m just having a bit of difficulty getting in with the right, active, group.

TIA

ETA: Thank you for the very warm welcome. Hopefully I will be turtley enough for the turtle club.

  • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
    101·
    5 days ago

    Not that “alternatively young” but the difference is slight here.

    Yeah I self host my Lemmy because why not? As well I self host my matrix with bridges to all main chat closed ecosystems because why not?

    At least my descendants will own all my comments and posts.

    And I also host (not at home, but on vps) my email because why not.

    Do you really need any other reason to?

    Also, Lemmy rocks, this community is one of the best and more active.

    • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      At least my descendants will own all my comments and posts.

      If you self-host, how much of that content disappear when your descendants shut down your instance?

      I used to host a bunch of academic data, but when I stopped working, there was no institutional support. Turned off the server and it all went away (still Wayback Machine archives). I mean, I don’t really care whether my social media presence outlives me, the experience just made me aware that personal pet projects are pretty sensitive to that person.

      • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        Yeah, that is something I keep thinking. I need a way to keep all that working somehow.

        Maybe a foundation, to keep personal data for future research scope, or general knowledge. Its sad that all that will go to waste.

        • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          4 days ago

          Wonder if there’s an opportunity there. Some way to archive one’s self-hosted, public-facing content, either as a static VM or, like archive.org, just the static content of URLs. I’m imagining a service one’s heirs could contract to crawl the site, save it all somewhere, and take care of permanent maintenance, renewing domains, etc. Ought to be cheap enough to maintain the content; presumably low traffic in most cases. Set up an endowment-type fee structure to pay for perpetual domain reg.