You don’t have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.
But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don’t need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
The thing is that I already have a server and a few Terabytes of unused storage. So that would not be an issue. As long as storage doesn’t en up adding that much. I know that the fediverse protocol likes to replicate storage among all servers involved in an interaction. Though I wonder if it would be possible to safely erase old data, specially if I’m just hosting it for myself. I need to investigate on that.
But for the other costs I already have a server running 24/7 on my house and several Tb of Storage.
And I also need to investigate how are the normal federation politics with one person instances. If it is like trying to host an email server would be hell as you’ll get mark as spam by a lot of providers.
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
No, federation is a lot easier than setting up an email server and 500GB of media storage should be enough for a long time for Lemmy. For the microblogging side, it will depend on how many media-heavy people you follow. If you follow hundreds of photographers, you will need to clear your remote media every once in a while.