I feel like over the past few months, the main thing preventing me from getting super active in the fediverse has been all of the drama surrounding federation and instances shutting down.
I just want to be able to turn my brain off, and not have to think “Will this instance be around in 6 months?” every time I post.
As a result, I’ve been thinking about creating a Lemmy and/or Mastodon instance that is literally just me and no one else. No communities or anything, simply me posting to other instances via this private instance. And I know that this instance will stay alive and federated for as long as I keep hosting it.
However before I go through the effort of setting these up, I want to know what people think about private instances. Is this bad taste? Is it a logistical nightmare? Have people done this before? And what would the hardware requirements for a 1 user instance look like?
I know a few people who have done this with Mastodon and it works quite well so far. Just like email, it doesn’t really matter where it’s hosted as long as it’s being respectful and not sending out spam.
That being said, AFAIK you can’t transfer a Lemmy account between instances yet, so if you ever change your mind and want to move to another instance, you may have to create a new account.