I feel like over the past few months, the main thing preventing me from getting super active in the fediverse has been all of the drama surrounding federation and instances shutting down.
I just want to be able to turn my brain off, and not have to think “Will this instance be around in 6 months?” every time I post.
As a result, I’ve been thinking about creating a Lemmy and/or Mastodon instance that is literally just me and no one else. No communities or anything, simply me posting to other instances via this private instance. And I know that this instance will stay alive and federated for as long as I keep hosting it.
However before I go through the effort of setting these up, I want to know what people think about private instances. Is this bad taste? Is it a logistical nightmare? Have people done this before? And what would the hardware requirements for a 1 user instance look like?
@testsnake@lemmy.blahaj.zone Private instances are perfectly fine! There is nothing wrong with wanting to explore the Fediverse on an instance that is yours and yours alone!
For context though, I am biased towards self-hosting. I am running the private Calckey instance I am replying from, I’ve ran a private Akkoma instance before, and I am running a low user Kbin instance.
Generally speaking, the resources required to host a private Fediverse instance are low. You could likely get an instance running on the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi! (Would recommend getting as much RAM as possible though) Though, some instances are harder to initialise than others! Akkoma and Calckey are a breeze to set up, but Kbin is a nightmare if you don’t know what you’re doing (or, Docker-wise if you don’t use the V2 docker instructions). Luckily, the Fediverse tends to be a nice place, so there is help to be found if you find yourself stuck somewhere!