I host my own because it’s cheap, less than 10 dollars per month, and I wanted to contribute to the growth of the Lemmy community.

Also turns out that it’s another benefit to this: I don’t have to get involved in the entire political debate of who federated with who. I just subscribe to communities I want anywhere.

As far as I understand it currently people host their own Lemmy instances just for the hell of it or out of the goodness of their heart

But the larger instances will end up costing more money and I’m doubtful that will be sustainable with no income

I really like the overall concept of Lemmy, so I decided to set up lemm.ee to support the Lemmy network with my skillset. I have previously had the privilege of being responsible for running large platforms online (end-to-end, everything from operations to software engineering), and so far, this experience seems to be extremely relevant for running Lemmy in its current state.

As for paying for hosting, my initial plan was to to just pay for everything myself as kind of a hobby, but the userbase at lemm.ee has been very gracious in first asking me several times to share costs, and then actually sending money once I set up donations. I’m not sure yet if this donations-based funding will be sustainable, or if it will fall off after the initial hype dies, but for now it’s really awesome to see that there are several other people who believe in lemm.ee and want to share financial responsibility for it.

I have a pretty unique domain name and don’t mind the $7 a month to run the instance on AWS. I’m not going to do a ton with it, but I would if there was interest.

I decided to host my own because I was on lemmy.world and we got blocked by beehaw, which had many of the communities I wanted to be a part of. I run mine on a server that’s in my house, so the only thing I’m paying for is electricity. And I have solar panels.

I’m selfhosting my instance for fun and not for profit. I’m using a server on Hetzner that costs me 4.11/mo. I’m the only active user of my instance, but I like to own my own data and selfhost my own services.

I host my own instance mostly because I find it fun to do, and because it allows me to choose which communities and instance I federate with without having my account tied to the whims of somebody else.

To have some control over my data and for the fun of it. With money? Selfhosting to me is a hobby and it has also taught me a lot, some of which has been helpful on my career.

I started !programming.dev because I am a moderator of several 100k+ subs over on Reddit and I didn’t want my communities to not have a place to go if Reddit crashed and burned (even though it’s incredibly unlikely). The main sub I moderated (/r/ExperiencedDevs) for years wanted user verification to combat the spam that was newbies commenting and posting about things they didn’t really know or understand. This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn’t really care about their communities.

I am also a strong supporter of pulling control away from megacorps. We need more small to medium sized businesses on the planet.

For selfish reasons? I wanted to work on something new and have true ownership over it, the ability to build a community that worked together to build something without capitalism standing in the way. It might seem strange, but one of the first things I did was bring multiple other people on board to help me maintain the server, even going so far as to add domain managers to the domain name. This was all to counter the major questions people were asking around “what if the host decides they don’t want to host anymore?”. Well hopefully the programming.dev community is willing to take that burden if the time ever comes, even though I hope it doesn’t. I also wanted to start something similar to a coop, where ownership is shared, meaning users have incentives to make the platform better. I have lots of ideas around this, but this will never be possible on Reddit. It is quite feasible here.

I also had the chance to buy an incredibly dope domain name! https://programming.dev! Why wouldn’t I jump at that chance? And I get to even use it instead of let it flounder. So many reasons to host something like this, to build a trusting community, a safe space to have to let people talk about a shared love/topic/hobby.

I was thinking of doing it so certain communities from the other place would feel welcome, but someone is domain squatting what I was planning

I’ve just launched one:

lemmy.fosshost.com

Why?

• I get free hosting with my job
• I’m a FOSS enthusiast and want to contribute to the fediverse

I hosted ad-free invision and phpbb forums for almost a decade before the centralized services started. I do it because I like social media and understand the value of a vibrant commons. I’ve been working with computers since I was a child so hosting yet-another-app-server is not really that big of a deal and gives my users and myself a place we can call home on the internet.

The out-of-pocket cost is minimal for a small instance, for larger instances scaling issues are going to hit eventually and costs will go beyond what 1-person will bear without complaint.

Highly recommend more smaller instances.

My server costs me only about $5 USD a month and I can host thousands of users without much additional effort (my sites before would usually run to ~10k users).

**Tl;dr we do this because we want to, the act itself is often fulfillment. **

I want my own space in the internet and I set aside money for it monthly from my paychecks

I’ve loved the idea behind Lemmy since I first discovered. At first, I was using lemmy.ml, but then I saw the opportunity to provide a nice space and expand my sysadmin skills. Since there was no Portuguese instance yet, I thought why not create one?
Since then, I’ve met more people hosting Portuguese services and it has been great :D

For funding, I’m working on two ways: the typical donations and trying to secure support from local FOSS organizations. At the moment, the server costs are not prohibitive and there have been some donations already. I’ve also been talking to some of those orgs and it’s going well :)

Since devices that compute generate heat, it is a good way to hear your home up in the PNW. Additionally, you get to host websites. Everyone wins.

Better if you mine crypto, cuz any profit is just extra. You get the same results as if you were using a wall heater but you also get something in return.