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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: February 3rd, 2026

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  • I’ve been running straight Ubuntu with ZFS-on-Linux since 18.04, and it has been smooth sailing. If you’re running a lot of containerized things it’s very convenient to just be able to bind mount ZFS dataset into containers.

    Normally I prefer CentOS/RockyLinux, or some other EL distribution, but in this case I really appreciate that Canonical isn’t purist enough to ship ZFS as a loadable kernel module that is guaranteed to be in sync with the shipped kernel. And don’t have to deal with DKMS.



  • Honestly, I think your friend is right, it’s a question of economy of scale. As you scale up there will be less and less wasted resources in overhead. Once you reach the scale where you need hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of servers to operate your site you’d likely be able to fairly efficiently dimension the amount of servers you have so that each server is pretty efficiently utilized. Youd only need to keep enough spare capacity to handle traffic bursts, which would also become smaller compared to the baseline load the larger your site becomes.

    Realistically most self-hosted setups will be mostly idle in terms of CPU capacity needed, with bursts as soon as the few users accesses the services.

    As for datacenters using optimized machines there is probably some truth to it. Looking at server CPUs they usually constrain power to each core to add more cores to the CPU. Compared to consumer CPUs where at least high-end CPUs crank the power to get the most single-core performance. This depends heavily on what kind of hardware you are self-hosting on though. If you are using a raspberry-pi your of course going to be in favor, same is probably true for miniPCs. However if you’re using your old gaming computer with an older high-end CPU, your power efficiency is very likely sub-optimal.

    As a “fun” fact/anecdote, I recently calculated that my home server which pulls ~160W comes out as 115kWh in a month. This is a bit closer than I would like to the 150-200 kWh I spend on charging my plug-in hybrid each month… To be fair though I had not invested much in power efficiency of this computer, running the old gaming computer approach and a lot of HDDs.

    That said there is plenty of other advantages with self-hosting, but I’m not sure the environmental angle works out as better overall.






  • It’s extremely unlikely that they are going to do any kind of deep traffic inspection in the router/modem itself. Inspecting network traffic is very intensive though and gives very little value since almost all traffic is encrypted/HTTPS today, with all major browsers even showing scare warnings if’s regular unencrypted HTTP. Potentially they could track DNS queries, but you can mitigate this with DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS (For best privacy I would recommend Mullvad: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls)

    And of course, make sure that anything you are self-hosting is encrypted and using proper HTTPS certificates. I would recommend setting up a reverse proxy like Nginx or Traefik that you expose. Then you can route to different internal services over the same port based on hostname. Also make sure you have a good certificate from Letsencrypt






  • It’s the Network effect. At the end of the day, Lemmy is still a lot smaller than Reddit, and of course that means there is less content, especially in more niche communities. The only way to really improve the situation is to grow the network with more users and more diversity.

    I feel like the activity level is good enough to use it mostly, but I also still check in on Reddit regarly because some communities are simply very inactive on here.

    I guess what you can do as an individual is to post more content, participate in the community, and help spread the word that the fediverse even exists.