I’m thinking about deploying my own instance where I’d be the only user and most probable I won’t have any communities.
The only thing there will be my account to interact with as many other instances as I want.
What would be de pros and cons of having my account like this?
Would it be harder to interact with other instances in some way?
Personally I think it’s a great idea. I run my own instance even though I’m the only user and have no communities.
Pros:
Moderation: Your own moderation capabilities. It’s your choice what you see or don’t see.
Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don’t have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.
Performance: Generally speaking you’ll have better performance. You won’t have to worry about an influx of new users taking the instance down due to overloads.
Cons:
Domain: You need your own domain, which is an ongoing cost.
Hosting: Like the domain, you need to pay for hosting to run Lemmy. You could try running it at home, but I would not recommend it.
Management: Depending on how you setup Lemmy, there will probably be ongoing maintenance work. It might not be worth the hassle when you can just use a third party instance and let them deal with it.
Ultimately it’s up to you.
I agree. Single person instances are really good for the health of the fediverse. If people can, and want that level of control, they should.
RE: cost. I’m doing a digital ocean droplet for $6 month which seems plenty for running Lemmy. So that’s $72 a year, plus maybe $20 for a domain name. So generally speaking if you can budget about $10 a month for your social media habit it can be done.
I’m also running a $12 DO droplet (for Akkoma microblogging/“twitter” software) so my total costs are a little higher, but still i find its a reasonable trade off for my habits.
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Although an alternative way to look at it is that is could be a great way to hone your devops / SRE skills. Even if that’s not the direction you really want your career to head, it can never hurt to have a really good understanding of that side of the industry.
Conversely, this is the main thing keeping me from setting up my own instance. You have to do your own backups and keep everything running. If you mess up, you loose your whole identity. I’m a software engineer, but I’m a mediocre sys admin. I have the technical skills to host my own instance but I don’t want the stress of getting it right.