leopardboy

As far as I know, Lemmy doesn't have a way of following anyone else on the Fediverse, but you can certainly follow Lemmy users from Mastodon.

It's personal preference, but I find it easier, for sure.

In the Mastodon web interface, you can take the URL of the Lemmy community and paste it into the search bar. After you press Enter, the community should show up, and you can follow it.

Another way to reference the community is using @ notation. For this community, you'd reference @technology@beehaw.org in Mastodon.

I use Ivory to access my Mastodon account, and I've found that it doesn't recognize URLs from Lemmy at all. So, the @ notation works best there. Regardless, the Mastodon web interface handles it all properly.

You're talking about Lemmy, right?

I provisioned an Ubuntu 22.02 server at Linode. I chose their 2 GB Shared CPU instance type. Once I configured the server to my liking, I ran through the Lemmy-Ansible instructions. (They have other methods, so check the documentation.)

Essentially, you install Ansible on your workstation. I'm on macOS and installed it via Homebrew. You then download their git repository, create the necessary configuration files, and then have Ansible configure the server. It was fairly simple.

I've wondered that myself, and I don't know, to be honest, but there are some issues you'd certainly encounter. For example, if you posted any media it would need to be somewhere "always on" or remote instances and users might not be able to see it unless they managed to cache it on time. It means that your posts URLs wouldn't be accessible, and would only be available on servers to which it has already federated. There may be other issues, too, such as queues only keeping undelivered messages for so long, etc.

I'm sure someone with a good understanding of ActivityPub could explain whether or not this is possible.

Sure, one could do that, but I prefer to keep things separate.

Yes, there is electricity.

I think Internet connectivity could also be an issue, unless you have an ISP that's friendly to you running a publicly accessible server on your Internet connection at home.

I figured out my problem. 🙃

When I configured my single-user Lemmy instance, I marked the server as "private" in the settings. I thought that was a good idea, but it actually prevents my avatar from being accessible from the Internet. I'm not entirely sure what else it impacted.

Once I made my server "public" in my server setting, I was able to pull my avatar from my Mastodon instance.

I've joined the Patreon, but I won't be opening an account on the instance since I'll be following your communities from my own. Thanks so much!

That's awesome. This was several months ago when there was a link to some specific Arch Linux documentation that @dansup@mastodon.social mentioned was the most complete. Sounds like it's been cleaned up.

Yeah, I think it is a PHP app.

Now if you do host for yourself then you can federate with other instances to subscribe and pull from their communities which does reduce the total load on those services but that is about it.

That is the main thing I'm doing, personally.

Communities are going to Win/Loose based on personalities and critical mass, and the people hosting those communities will just have to increase their hosting needs.

Speaking of hosting, I got to thinking what might happen when a community needs to move to another server. I wonder if some day we'll see a solution similar to Mastodon's where users can move their accounts and/or entire communities between Lemmy instances.

Sure.

I run my own instance at a cloud provider, and thus have monthly expenses I wouldn't normally incur, if I were using a public instance.