Let’s say I decided that instead of blogging, I wanted to host my own Lemmy instance that contained a maximum of one (1) user– me, but allowing other users to subscribe.
To show what I’m talking about, look at how kaidomac uses Reddit as his own personal microblog, which people subscribe to.
What is the cheapest way to do this?
My mental model of Lemmy is that if I were to do this, the instance would still be caching information from other instances. This would– at least in my mine– add up in costs.
I’m a software engineer, so feel free to use technical jargon.
Lemmy claims to be able to support any Bootstrap 5 theme as a drop-in Lemmy theme, and it’s surprisingly close to being true. If you go to ponder.cat right now, you’ll see one, based on Sandstone, that I’ve been fooling around with, because the provided Lemmy themes are mostly awful to me.
You could run one backend instance, have a main frontend to it on lemmy.whatever.com, and have a second frontend on whatever.com, with the theme set to a minimally modified version of Clean Blog or something, stripping out all the UI stuff and leaving only a blog. That would give you an RSS feed, a blog, a community that Lemmy people could follow, and a Fediverse actor that Mastodon people could follow, all in one place with all the comments unified. If you want to set the theme up that way, I can give you pointers, since I’ve just now been working on this for my instance.