Yes, always have and always will. The internet is just plain hostile without one. Watching others browse the web without one is fascinating to watch. I don’t really care much for the “moral” side of things.

Just for fun, I checked my self hosted AdGuard DNS and 60% of queries were blocked! That’s insane. That’s just DNS level blocking.

That is also another concern of mine for self hosting. I know the fediverse is facing a massive bot problem right now and some suggestions of doing whitelists or blacklists to help combat this, so having my own private instance could even be a worse move in the near future.

Yea was considering it. Already have a server where I self host a lot of things for my own use. Just concerned about security, as my server isn’t reachable via the internet (so security has been a bit “loose” so far since it doesn’t really matter) and I would have to open a port for this.

Also opens a few privacy issues. Either I use my existing domain which would expose my dns records and SSL cert history to anyone who wants to know or just buy a new domain just for Lemmy. Even still through, my IP would be permanently attached to the server which would be public for anyone wanting to follow up my instance. I could try and host it behind a VPN that allows port forwarding, but just adding more complexity and cost the setup…

Could also just buy a cheap VPS and just use that for just the Lemmy instance so I wouldn’t need a VPN. Just feels like it would go a little bit against the self hosting spirit since I actually have my own hardware to do so…

What do you mean by this? Its currently based on 22.04 LTS? Can’t find anything about them going to non-LTS

That makes sense. Just a bit confusing, because it can make communities look inactive and put people off of subscribing when going through the explore tab for example.