Hello, with the spicy beehaw drama I was wondering, would it be possible to selfhost a lemmy instance literally just for yourself and no one else to like, circumvent any defederation shenanigans? As all instances federate per default, this should work right?

Allthough, as far as my understanding of how federation works is that I would need to manually subscribe to every community on every instance that I’m interested in as federation only syncs communities that have at least one subscriber on the hosting instance, correct?

Or is there a way to subscribe to EVERYTHING?

Other than that is there any obvious downside to doing that?

  • It’s definitely an interesting selling point. I’ve always said you have to take the good with the bad on social media, but having independent instances who can curate things a bit means you don’t actually have to take the bad if you don’t want. Even though the Beehaw admin themselves said this is essentially a nuke and not how they’d preferred to have handled it (Lemmy doesn’t have the tools just yet to do it any other way) it’s still interesting and unique in social media.

    Beehaw is creating an identity for themselves and sticking to it, rather than being a general instance. Some people will love that, some will hate it. But ultimately it’s whats going to make Beehaw a unique place to be for those who want it without taking anything away from those who don’t. This is all still early stages for Lemmy and there are growing pains for sure, but this sort of thing, to me at least, shows the possibilities of a Federated network.