After over a year I’m going to take down my personal Lemmy server. Running it on Hetzner has been relatively easy and with only a few hiccups along the way, for a single user instance it uses about 20-30gb of storage for it’s db and image cache.
Why did you selfhost?#
Like most people after the Reddit enshitification I was looking for a new home, Lemmy seemed like the right place. Rather than jump on the bigger servers I decided I’d selfhost it and have a another little part of the internet for myself, similar to how I have my own Mastodon instance.
Selfhosting Lemmy was actually a lot easier than Mastodon so I was quite surprised to be up and running as quickly as I was, posts started federating very quickly and I was seeing content from around 40-50 different communities I subscribed to across some of the bigger servers.
Why take it down?#
- Content - the communities I follow have been slowly dying, the mass exodus from reddit fueled a gold rush to Lemmy which was great but over time content quality and quantity has declined.
- Moderation - every so often I find that communities I follow have been abandoned and waves of spam hit them, it’s not fun knowing that you have no power other than to block a million accounts. Reporting posts only affects my instance which isn’t very useful.
- Racism/Homophobia/Extremism, I see more racist, homophobic and extremist language than I thought I would, again blocking users is the only solution. I don’t go out of my way to find this content I find it just filters into communities I’m already part of.
- I’m happy with Mastodon, this is a fairly simple one to explain, Mastodon is everything I want from a social media platform. There are still issues with it but at least with Lemmy gone it’s one less thing to worry about.
- It’s tied to my identity, it wouldn’t take someone very long to do a bit of exploring to find out who I am on Lemmy and that really restricted my usage of it, it’s no different to being on my own Mastodon instance but Lemmy just feels worse. I’ve only ever posted a handful of comments because of this.
Will I come back?#
Nah, the web has fundamentally changed and my usage of it has to as well. Reddit was great, a fountain of useful knowledge until it wasn’t. What I wanted out of Lemmy was the same thing but you can’t beat Reddit and Google, you can only try and avoid them and build your own piece of the internet.