All fine and dandy, but don't just pick a random one close to you. Don't forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.
Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don't mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.
Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info
What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don't even require an email address to sign up.
Like if you are ginger or not
Pfft - everyone knows you need a soul to get online
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren't ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn't say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.
My main concern would be instance longevity.
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy)
A public IP address is (by definition) public. If you're behind CG-NAT you don't get your own public IP and if you have a public IP but not a static one then restarting your router will change it. I don't think there are many cases where an instance knowing your public IP is an issue. Lemmy instances hotlink media from other instances so many different instances get your IP just from browsing Lemmy.
My main concern would be instance longevity
This is a different conversation but if your account is meaningful then this should be a real concern. A month ago there were about 80 instances, now there are nearly 1000. How many of those will still exist in a year?
I am aware of how a public facing IP address works, and how little information it does give, by itself. It is still a privacy concern, and can be used in conjunction with other data to launch social engineering attacks or to help narrow down other data.
Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.
Close to you helps in general, it's not Lemmy specific. Though the Lemmy web ui caches stuff heavily so it might not be that much of a concern.
Yeah being overloaded is definitely the biggest factor but servers being close also helps especially when you have a slow Internet connection. That is why I added bring close part as "preferably"
Thank you for this. Just wish there was a way to migrate account to still keep posts/comments/subs/etc but oh wrll. Faster now at least
There are feature requests on the gethub for Lemmy to add the ability to move users and communities between instances. It comes up often enough it's just a question of how to implement it and when.
Can I migrate my account to a new instance? Or will i have user logins all over the fediverse?
For right now, I believe there is no way to move a user account so you will need to create a new one. Can be the same name, tho!
I believe there is a feature in the works to be able to move accounts between instances but I am unsure of where in the development pipeline it is.
The best way Ive found is to copy the html of your community list and paste it into an online tool that pulls the hyperlinks out of it, then make an excel spreadsheet to change the URL of the community to the https format so it's easier to search. The instances also aren't 100% compatible. Like I can subscribe to kbin and Fedia on my larger instance account but not on my self hosted one.
Yeah, Lemmy being in a very "alpha" state makes some of the things a user wants to do difficult.
Yeah, that will be nice if you can migrate your name to other instances... Cheers!
Y’all are welcome over at thegarden.land we have a “growing” community
Was here thinking, couldn't I host my own instance for my own usage?
Oh, absolutely. I think that’s the ideal state, everybody hosting their own local instance for a couple hundred people, all indexed with everyone else. Long way to go before we get there though.
I know this may not be popular but I may only host to myself. I have a VPS for my personal website and other projects that has some free processing power available (its a Hetzner ARM VPS, the cheapest), so I also need to figure out if Lemmy runs on ARM SoCs. I figure it must run since some people may try to run it on RPIs.
I host a small instance in the US. I think the data center is in New Jersey.
You'll have to verify your email (I only have that on because we lost captcha support with 0.18, I'll turn it off next update. Feel free to use a burner email if you want)
How can I see if an instance is hosted in my country?
You can click the "use map" button on this site: https://fediverse.observer/. But if you can't find a instance that you like that is close don't worry. Because server closeness doesn't matter nearly as much as servers being overloaded.
Holy crap there are at least 12 different servers within 50 miles of me. Some have a few thousand subscribers lol.
Gotta love Houston. Thanks for linking that!
So if I host my instance but subscribe to communities on lemmy.world do I actually lessen the load on lemmy.world because it only has to deal with the API calls from my instance instead of having to serve me a full fat UI? (damn that was a long sentence!)
Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.
Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)
I'm hosting a tiny instance for myself a few friends that serves as a reliable gateway to communities and content from bigger instances. Sign up approvals are limited, but I'm open to a few public users.
Currently email verification is enabled, but feel free to use a burner. This will be disabled in favor of captchas when 0.18.1 drops.
For people still looking for an instance close to their location: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map
Do you have any advice on how to find one? Especially the “local to you” part?
You can check this list and find an instance hosted in/close to your country.
Great advice. One thing to look out for is the language settings under the profile on that instance though. I also signed up to a new instance and my feed seemed less populated and more outdated. I noticed that the languages that I read were not checked in the profile. Once I changed this the experience was significantly better.
Page loads are snappy and lightning fast at laguna.chat :). Open signups and open for new communities. Hosted in Germany and GDPR ready. https://laguna.chat
Is moving instances a thing or would you need to sign up from scratch?
AFAIK you need to sign up from scratch. But I'm pretty sure Lemmy devs will work on that. It's already a thing on Mastodon.
Currently Lemmy doesn't support account migrating but it is technically possible afaik. It might get added in future but currently you have to sing up from sracth. Hovewer I would say having a Lemmy.world account in addition is probably a good call.
added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too
Can you elaborate?
Beehaw.org chose to defederate some big instances like lemmy.world because the beehaw admins feel like they can't moderate the inappropriate content entering their instance from big instances without proper mod tools.
They made a long post sharing their reasons but I can't find it at the moment.
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