@sam@r1b.it I think a lot of it boils down to knowledge. You'd be surprised by the amount of people who need their hands held the first time they buy a domain name, who have never so much as paid for a subscription to a managed service before.

It's easy to take for granted the technical abilities that are necessary to self-host an instance. None of it is exactly difficult, but it's time-consuming and requires a lot of specific knowledge.

Most people are answering the title question but is your question about why people use a VPS or paid server for a Lemmy instance instance of hosting at home?

Content is federated in. My home server is not a good place to keep unknown images, videos, and links to other content. The risks associated with hosting user content are the main reason for using a data centre instead of home hosting.

There are also other benefits like complete separation from my personal hosted services that are actually hosted from home, and privacy and security reasons. As an example, my home hosted services are not available from outside my country, which virtually eliminates the malicious vulnerability scanning bots that constantly hit the domain before I added that limitation. But you can’t have that limitation for a federated service or it wouldn’t be able to federate. I have this country restriction on my router as part of the port forwarding rules.

But mostly it’s that first thing about the user generated content.

Specifically for Piefed/Lemmy, I have all the experience and knowledge necessary to self host my own instance. I’ve been managing servers since before half of Lemmy’s population was born. And what it has taught me, is it is always better when its is someone else’s problem. My home lemmy instance closed down, which could have been a chance for me to self host, but I, instead, spent a little time finding another instance I liked, because I didn’t want to be responsible for it.

I actually own a domain with the idea of starting a Piefed and Mastodon instance, but I’ve never been willing to set it up and deal with the overhead. Maybe one day I’ll decide to, especially if feddit.online ever goes offline, but for now, I enjoy it being someone else’s problem.

Also, I’m pretty sure the fediverse wouldn’t work if everyone had an instance of 1. Maybe some day someone will crack a fully distributed P2P ActivityPub like solution, but until then, the health of the swarm requires we stay somewhere between “1 company runs everything” and “there are 7 billion fediverse instances”.

Convince your partner that you need £600 for hardware box and then 4x£200 for hard drives (before HDDs became a mess, now those HDDs are impossible to find AND they are £480 off the back of the lorry).

But cost aside, I know how to self host and solve most of the issues around it but I don’t know much and don’t have many plumbing tools, or carpentry, I can do some basic things but it will be shit and wonky.

That’s why you pay for experts who can do what you cannot. For instance I need to probably replace threads and risers and I would not be able to do that myself without breaking the entire staircase (I tried to start)

I’m not a developer. I don’t code. So when it comes to building my own local infrastructure from scratch and maintaining it like it’s not a full time job… I don’t know man….

A lot of people here are saying that it’s difficult and takes a lot of time and money to get started. It doesn’t. I learned how in just a few days, and I’ve been hosting everything on this shitty computer from 20 years ago that I got for free.

Seriously, it took me just a few days to go from absolutely zero knowledge about self hosting to get about 80% of what I know now, the other 20 is just neat tips and tricks I’ve learned in the past year and a half that have made the experience smoother.

Now, I host almost every service I use, the only exceptions being YouTube and steam, and other general forums for when I look things up.

I would love to but the main issue is I don’t have motivation, the time to learn, or the money to set it up the way I’d like. I can’t even get a pihole running atm, despite trying. I once had a server on my old desktop but couldn’t even take the time to rip all my movies to Jellyfin. I’m also concerned about having all my stuff in one location (and if that’s the same with a corp then that doesn’t change with me self hosting 😬). I would love it for privacy but there’s a few options that are convenient and supposedly secure enough that I am willing to make the trust compromise. I would really like to own my router or set up that pihole though, but see first sentence :/

I agree more people should self host.

Disclaimer: I'm fediverse developer myself of Mbin. And also host all my services and websites.

I thought about setting up my own personal instance, but I didn’t want to have to deal moderate any CSAM.

I self host a cheap VPS but my main worry is keeping it secure and locked down. I’m not a security expert so while I use it to store and share files I don’t upload anything personal to it.

I self host a Nextcloud instance at home but it isn’t accessible from outside my local network. I want to keep it as secure as possible. I back up the files to three different mediums every couple of days and I think that’s the part a lot of non techie people might struggle with.

The power cost isnt worth running a server 24/7. I dont want to invest in redundancy or storage space for a social media site. I dont want to have my account linked directly to my home ip for privacy and security reasons. I’d rather use pooled resources from the local instance and donate $20 every now n then.

I self-host Mastodon on a cheap VPS. It’s kind of a hassle. Just recently I found it running out of disk space because I followed an account that auto-boosts a lot of media. It was like 50gb per day of media cache. I unfollowed that account.

That’s a minor problem that didn’t even involve malicious activity.

To make an apple pie from scratch you must first create the universe

One may not have the hardware on hand to self-host.

Most people don’t make their own furniture, clothes, or ingredients either. It’s difficult, time-consuming, and requires a significant up-front (and ongoing) investment of money and of specialized knowledge that most people have neither the time nor care to deal with while managing the rest or their life.