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.

I’m more concerned about whitelists where I need to apply for federation with the big players or some sort of automated bot solution that may inadvertently blacklist small, legitimate servers.

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…