Asklemmy

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

You must be able to administrate and pay for a server.
Apart from that, it would not be nice to participate in the network and use the computing capacity of others, but not bring any infrastructure into the network yourself (by registration lock).

Just curious, which beehaw drama?

Edit: ah, scrolled down a bit and found this, assume that's it.

I’ve been curious about this also but for a different reason. I assume all my posts and comments are hosted at the instance I’m subscribed to. Should that server go down away for any reason my account and all its data would be lost right? I’d rather be in control of keeping my own data safe.

It makes me think of when you sign up for a VPS like linode and they have a bunch of drop-in applications you can click to install. Like cpanel, wordpress etc. But you aren't really fully running it in the same way as if it was physically a device in your home. There are some pro admins taking care of some of the details.

I feel something like that would be the middle ground for people wanting independence without having to learn such deep systems admin skills.

When people say "instances federate by default", they don't mean the instances engage in active content discovery. They mean the default behaviour when someone goes to look for content that's offsite is to connect to the remote instance.

Running a solo Lemmy or kbin instance puts all of the responsibility of content discovery on your own shoulders. You'll need to go out and scout other instances to see what you want to follow, and then subscribe to those sources in order to keep content flowing.

I highly recommend having a secondary account that you use to subscribe to things somewhat indiscriminately so you can separate out your subscribed feed from your all feed in a meaningful way.

What's happened to beehaw?