I am wanting to self host a fediverse instance. I don’t hope to make it big. Hoping for 200 users at most, and I won’t advertise it heavily so it’ll probably be a while before it gets there.
Is it a bad idea to host something like this on local hardware at home? I have a lot of local-only self hosted services, and I wouldn’t want those to be compromised.
But my biggest fear is overloading my network. I already don’t get the fastest signal in some parts of my house, and I am worried the extra traffic might put more pressure on the network.
What are your thoughts on hosting local? Should I just avoid the headache and host on public instance?
Your biggest fear should be something like the CSAM attack from a few months ago. I doubt you have tens of thousands to spend on a lawyer.
That’s why I killed my instance.
Did that instance have public registration? What speaks against having it for private (family) use only, as a gateway to the public instances?
Public registration has nothing to do with federation. My instance required admin approval for all new registrations. Illegal content is much more likely to come through federation than from inside.
IMHO, the few reasons to host your own instance largely disappeared with 0.19 and the risks were never worth the rewards to run a tiny instance. Things are likely to continue improving with future releases. Which is why sdf.org became my main.
You could just disable pict-rs, I believe.
But my biggest fear is overloading my network. I already don’t get the fastest signal in some parts of my house, and I am worried the extra traffic might put more pressure on the network.
This line concerns me. How experienced are you with servers and networking? Your WiFi network should be fine unless you have your server on WiFi - which you absolutely should not. Ethernet only.
If you set this up limit it to just yourself and friends to start. Get a feel for it before exposing it to strangers.
I have it on WiFi unfortunately.
If I put it the server on Ethernet, would it no longer impact the WiFi connection of any other device? I guess it makes sense that it wouldn’t.
Extending Ethernet to the server won’t be trivial, but I think you’re right I might have to do it.
Either that or maybe a separate wifi network so it can have the network to itself.
You can always start with it where it is and start small - get comfortable with hosting and how the server will behave. You don’t need to solve all the problems at once.
Could be a target of intentional or unintentional DDOS.
