Hal

That has 8GB RAM. The only reason the Pi in the headline is so expensive is the 16GB RAM. As others mentioned, the 1GB or 2GB options are a fraction of the cost.

Yeah I don’t think people defederate based on what happens on your own instance, only what flows to other instances.

As others say, buy a domain so it’s easier in the future.

But one thing what helped me was relay email addresses. Whether that’s Addy, Simplelogin (now owned by proton so probably not), Firefox Relay, or another. When you sign up to shit, buy something, etc, use one of these email addresses. When you eventually move to your new email address, you can cutover all those accounts to the new one by changing the settings for where it forwards email to.

You can also use your own domain with a catchall and make up your own whatever@yourdomain if you’re ready for that.

Ah that makes sense, thanks!

If you want to hand out candy to children year round, you could consider becoming a tree? Saw this guy on the weekend, handing out lollipops to kids at the playground while playing the saxophone: https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/17-07-2022/have-you-seen-the-walking-talking-tree-of-wellington

Full disclosure, doing this may get you shot in the US, and this is not that unusual for Wellington NZ, we’re just kinda like this.

If it’s automated, why only run it weekly?

Yes. I cancelled almost 2 years ago hoping they would improve by the time it was up but now I only have a month left to sort a new service 😭

Realistically it doesn’t need to request the DNS record every time. It’s probably retrying over and over because you blocked it, otherwise it would just cache the result for a while.

I remember some huge number of blocked requests when I set up my pihole, but eventually they calmed down as devices gave up their retrying.

The average searches per user on Google is something like 30 a month lol. But I’m a 500-1000 kind of guy.

Depending on what I’m doing it can get higher, especially if I’m doing dev stuff.

I guess I’m just surprised that you do that many searches and think paying for search is a waste of money. Being able to customise search results (block Pinterest, have MDN ranked higher, rewrite reddit.com to old.reddit.com, etc) is easily worth $10 a month to me.

But as I said to someone else, $10USD can be a coffee or a weeks wages depending on where you are in the world, so it’s probably going to hugely sway people’s views on if it’s worth it.

Yeah at times I’ll do 1000 a month, but 3500 excluding work related seemed pretty big.

And if you’re doing that many searches and refinements, it seems the $10 a month should be more worth it.

But $10USD can be anything from a coffee to a week’s wages depending on where you are in the world, so I can understand different opinions on whether it’s worth it.

Technically yes I guess, but I would expect “maintenance” to refer to the cost of keeping the ice cream cart working and looking good, I wouldn’t expect the wholesale cost of ice cream to be in the “maintenance” column of my cart finances.

I Kagi’s case they are paying per search to connect to APIs to search other search engines and aggregate the results. They have a very real cost per search that isn’t only maintaining software.

Ok sorry ignoring the rest of your comment but how do you do 2500-3500 searches a month? That’s 100 a day, and you explicitly excluded work related searching.

You’re doing a search every 10 minutes of every waking hour of every day, not including searches done for work. You barely have time to read what you are searching.

Why so many searches?

Like coming to Lemmy and all the content is memes about the number 4

Browsing through the list… ok how do I tell if my server has been compromised, because I run a fuckload of those…

Legally? I’m not sure.

But if I had to explain to a jury, I’d sure rather have “the social media site’s server was in a data centre and hosted user content” as the explanation instead of trying to explain to laypeople “yes the material was on a computer in my house but akshully a computer and a server are the same thing, and there’s this concept among people online about hosting your own internet services” and so on.

Most people are answering the title question but is your question about why people use a VPS or paid server for a Lemmy instance instance of hosting at home?

Content is federated in. My home server is not a good place to keep unknown images, videos, and links to other content. The risks associated with hosting user content are the main reason for using a data centre instead of home hosting.

There are also other benefits like complete separation from my personal hosted services that are actually hosted from home, and privacy and security reasons. As an example, my home hosted services are not available from outside my country, which virtually eliminates the malicious vulnerability scanning bots that constantly hit the domain before I added that limitation. But you can’t have that limitation for a federated service or it wouldn’t be able to federate. I have this country restriction on my router as part of the port forwarding rules.

But mostly it’s that first thing about the user generated content.

I probably miss out on that aspect as I have everything automated 🤷

The two main benefits I’ve seen of private trackers are that you avoid the issue in the OP which happens all the time on public trackers, and that shows download in seconds.

Not sure how helpful they would be if things weren’t automated. I just have things set up so my Jellyfin users can request shows and they get downloaded automatically.

But with that said, “private” doesn’t mean it costs money, just that it requires an account (and usually that is an application process). It means they can kick people off for uploading things they shouldn’t.

Oh on private trackers it’s hard to keep a genuine ratio like that. Instead they typically assign points for time you spend seeding, and you use those points to “buy” upload credit that counts for your ratio.

Many private trackers have a requirement to log in every X months so occasionally I just go log in to each and spend all the points.