Yeah, all I know is that I am definitely seeing images loaded in from domains other than that of my instance as I load/scroll pages, which I want to be loaded via my instance for privacy reasons.

Most of your traffic will be incoming, not outgoing. Unless you are posting to a community hosted on your instance the only time you send stuff will be when you post or comment, and even then you only send that to the instance hosting the community.

edit: Also if you post an image in a post/comment that would get loaded from your instance.

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. You can do it quite cheaply. It is feasible to run on a ~$5/mo VPS (Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean, Scaleway, etc) if you are willing to suffer potential downtime if things go wrong on that one machine. Eventually you might run out of image storage, but that can offloaded to any object storage provider such as those offered by the cloud hosts I listed or ones run by e.g. AWS (S3), Wasabi, Cloudflare (R2), etc.
4. If you know nothing about servers, linux, docker, postgres, reverse proxies, netwroking, http, etc. then it may not be worth it to you. I like the idea of having complete control over what servers I federate with. I like the idea of having a built-in archive of everything I read and write on Lemmy. Running an instance is of minimal cost to me because I already run software (including postgres, the database Lemmy uses as well as my own email server) for myself so it is low impact to add just one more service. Ultimately there are so many variables that you have to decide it for yourself.

If you want some general advice on how to set things up or certain things you need to make sure are done right so your instance works feel free to reach out. If you want to check out a smaller instance (I am the only regular user, but have a few friends that use my instance from time to time) feel free to sign up for mine to see what it might be like.

Be the change you want to see. Setting up an instance is surprisingly easy, it's the admin stuff that will take much more time, and finding users that will probably be hard. Also scaling once you hit a certain level of size/traffic, but that'd be a good problem to have. To me the most beautiful part of the fediverse is that if you're not finding the instance with rules/defederation/etc you want you can make that place exist.

If you are interested in doing so I'd be more than happy to give what advice or help I can.

Which is why (much to my chagrin as someone who has only given out their GV number for 10+ years) many companies are blocking numbers identified as VOIP even if they are capable of doing SMS/MMS, and some even go so far as to block prepaid phones. This was a component of that whole Overwatch 2 phone number controversy: not only were they requiring a phone number to play despite people's battle.net accounts being years old, but they were also preventing some people from using their completely legitimate phone numbers.

The New Communities Community: !newcommunities@lemmy.world