terribleplan

1. You host it yourself
2. You can get a cool domain name
3. It’s pretty low maintenance

I would still go with one that isn’t one of the biggest. My general advice is to find one that fits the vibe you’re going for, communities you’re interested in (e.g. some are focused on art or cybersecurity, etc), or is somehow tied to your locality. It shouldn’t matter that much, though some servers will be a little more (or less) strict with things like federation, content warnings, alt text, etc. Usually the server will have some info telling you some of this, and their admin should be linked and likely has a post or two pinned to their profile explaining some of this as well.

I am partial to kind.social, though have opted to run my own instead of joining up anywhere.

As someone who hosts a bunch of other stuff already including my own email (because I am a madman), does stuff like this as a job, has developer experience, etc. it was simple.

Figuring each of these things out (and how they all work together) for the first time was a hell of a journey.

Asklemmy isn’t really a place to ask about lemmy, it’s for asking general questions to users of lemmy, jut like you wouldn’t ask for Reddit support in /r/askreddit.

Regardless, this question gets asked and talked about in the !selfhosted@lemmy.world community fairly often, here is a (slightly edited) comment I made a while back.

You will need a domain name, you can buy one from a registrar such as hover or namecheap (for the love of all that you consider holy do not use godaddy).

You will need a way to expose the server that you set up via port forwarding or similar on your network.

You will need to set up DNS records on the domain you buy to point to your home IP. You may want to figure out a different way to avoid just handing that information out, cloudflare can help with that. You will want to make sure the DNS records get automatically updated if your IP address changes, which is not uncommon for residential ISPs.

You will need to figure out how to get an SSL certificate, Let’s Encrypt will issue them for free, cloudflare gives you one if you use them as a reverse proxy.

Some of this would likely be easier to do on a cloud provider like digitalocean or linode and could be done reasonably cheaply.

These are all common things for setting up any website, so lemmy docs won’t cover them. In addition to those (this answer was just addressing “how to get a URL”) you will need to install and configure lemmy, lemmy-ui, postgres, and pictrs somewhere (the join-lemmy docs cover this well).

If you want your instance to send emails you will have to figure out how you want to do that (too many options to cover in this answer).

When 0.18.1 gets released if you want captcha you’ll probably have to figure out an mCaptcha provider or set that up yourself.

Not to mention thinking about backups, high availability, etc, etc.

As far as hardware to host on you could get away with like ~$10/mo on most any cloud provider, run it on a Mini-PC in your closet, etc. My instance uses 1-2 GB of RAM, ~13GB of disk (and growing a few hundred MB per day), and ~30% of a CPU (an old i5).

Best of luck.

Yeah, I think how most Lemmy clients (including the default web UI) handle display name is a real mistake.

They have been tuning the algorithm for that in the past releases, so may be related to that. Also, there is/was a bug where if you don’t restart lemmy (on the server) regularly stuff will get stuck at the top of hot and/or active.

And make sure that identifier scheme still works if different people on different subscriptions download the source and compare to filter identifiers like that out…

For communities or users many clients (including the default web ui) understand relative links, like [!asklemmy@lemmy.ml](/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml) or [@tymon@lemm.ee](/u/tymon@lemm.ee). The problem with these is that if instance the person reading your messages is on doesn’t know that user/community (because no one is locally subscribed to it or there have been no actions seen by that user) you will get an ugly 404 page with the only remedy being to perform a search for that unknown user/community/whatever manually. I think this issue is being worked on to make things more seamless, but IDK when this experience will be improved.

There is also technically no guarantee that any instance will keep track of non-local objects perpetually, so the “canonical” location of a thing is generally on the server that the user is based on. Posts and comments are referenced by a sequential ID that is different on every instance, so… yeah.

Technically there is a unique ID for every object sent through ActivityPub, so those may be linkable in the future with a similar scheme such as /post/288327@lemm.ee or something uglier like /post/https%3A%2F%2Flemm.ee%2Fpost%2F288327 depending on compatibility needs (as the IDs in ActivityPub are all full URLs to the source object)