Hal

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.

This seems like a one off for them, but for me whenever tracking ongoing TV series I would regularly get malicious files as they appear before the real ones, and get found and downloaded by sonarr.

These days I only automate from private trackers, and enable a public tracker for an interactive search only if something can’t be found on the private trackers.

I don’t think anyone has mentioned this yet, but the idea of AI hacking tools has also led to a lot more human effort in finding and fixing security issues.

A while back there was an article about AI security tools and something about over 200 security vulnerabilities patched (perhaps in Chrome?). But in the detail of the article, it mentioned only 4 were found by AI. The rest were found by humans trying to get there before people with AI tools found them.

Are the numbers actually shrinking for Lemmy+Piefed?

Lemmy has gone from 36,600 monthly active users to 33,600 users in the last year. A loss of 3,000 monthly active users.

Piefed has gone from 1,600 MAU a year ago to 6,900 MAU now, an increase of 5,300 users.

This means the total has increased by 2,300 MAU in the past year.

Note that this drop in Lemmy and rise in Piefed can be explained by lemmynsfw shutting down and being replaced by fedinsfw, which runs piefed and has 3,600 MAU. Arguably both Lemmy and Piefed are slowly gaining in MAU.