It’s honestly impressive what you can do with under 3W of power these days

I find the easiest way to think about it is kind of like email. You can have an account @gmail.com and still send mail to other servers @outlook.com. Your posts and comments will be stored on your local instance, as well as any instances that are subscribed to the community. When you post to a community on another instance, I think the text will be stored on both instances, but image uploads point back to the copy on your local instance.

I ignored all the email setup because I disabled signups anyway on my instance.

For DNS on my home server I use ddclient. It supports a ton of different DNS providers, so you can have your server automatically update its DNS record as soon as your IP changes.

Since I already host a bunch of stuff, it hasn’t been a big burden for me. I get to laugh any time one of the popular instances goes down or has some admin/mod controversy, but the tradeoff is I have to manually subscribe to everything since I don’t have an “All”.

I mostly did it because this is the only way to truly own your lemmy identity. I hope one day it will be possible to link accounts on different instances together so that migrating doesn’t lose your history.

Selfhosting Lemmy has been surprisingly nice

Honestly, every platform has the same problem, including real life countries. There’s always the possibility that whatever power is enforcing the rules is corrupted and doesn’t listen to anyone else. The mechanisms for fairly determining both what the rules should be and how to enforce them are always evolving as people find new ways to do bad things.

The fediverse is a nice system because it allows people to leave and make their own communities if the admins become toxic, incentivizing them to actually listen to users. I can only hope we don’t get overrun my AI slop like the rest of the internet.

I think the only safeguard against that is to do your own moderation. The only tool I can think of that would even come close to detecting “power tripping” would be AI, and we all know that would end terribly. The best you can do is remove incentives (somehow, idk) so mods aren’t rewarded for a bad ban.