I am wanting to self host a fediverse instance. I don’t hope to make it big. Hoping for 200 users at most, and I won’t advertise it heavily so it’ll probably be a while before it gets there.

Is it a bad idea to host something like this on local hardware at home? I have a lot of local-only self hosted services, and I wouldn’t want those to be compromised.

But my biggest fear is overloading my network. I already don’t get the fastest signal in some parts of my house, and I am worried the extra traffic might put more pressure on the network.

What are your thoughts on hosting local? Should I just avoid the headache and host on public instance?

  • oleorunEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    I’m doing what you want to do now. I’m running lemmy.fan on a NAS with really good hardware on a fiber connection. My ISP provides symmetric bandwidth and doesn’t block anything, though emails can’t be sent with a local smtp server since most places don’t trust the IP addresses of residential subscribers.

    I learned a ton, I’m enjoying running things, and though it’s an open instance I don’t advertise it. I say go for it. Experiment and have fun. If it sucks and you hate it you just stop the containers.

    • th3raid0rEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Lucky! I wish I had symmetrical fiber with all the ports available.

      I totally have a server capable of hosting a LOT of things but lack the upload to make use of it. I’m considering transferring to a rack mount and sending it to be colocated at a datacenter within driving distance.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)English
      2•1 year ago

      Realistically, how much bandwidth does Lemmy need if pict-rs is disabled, if you tested that?
      I am thinking of something a bit crazy if freenom shows up working again. Since my only internet connection is mobile data, I am thinking about the possibility of hosting Lemmy in Termux and using a Cloudflare tunnel. The biggest problem is probably bandwidth. It varies between 0.02-6Mbps, hanging around 1Mbps for most of the day.

      But I am not sure if Lemmy could even run in Termux in the first place.
      Probably a stupid idea regardless.