I’ve been experimenting with my instance and google does index my lemmy.mitchday.com page. If you search ‘lemmy mitch day’, you get my page right up top and a few motorhead fans named mitch down below.
My experiment involves trying to SEO a vanity domain I’ve had for years and only used for email. Since July 4, the page ranking for my general site has steadily climbed. The little bit of traffic from other instances and a handful of subscriptions seems to be impacting the ranking.
I’m trying out using my lemmy instance as a personal blog, more or less.
I have one community with pretty locked down settings and super SFW policy. Over time I will post things that might be of interest or that I want to show off. I selectively subscribe to some other communities on larger instances to get some visibility and be part of the conversation. But really Im using lemmy to drive traffic to my custom domain and as a way to SEO.
I have another personal use account on another instance I don’t own but that I align with philosophically. That’s where I keep my main collection of communities Im interested in.
I found the ansible playbook route described at join-lemmy.org to be very easy to install on a VPS. The benefit of a VPS is much simpler setup than running a home server, networking-wise. Plus it’s special purpose, so no need to worry about interfering with other things as you would on a multi purpose server.
I use mine as basically a personal blog that I have a bit more control over. I’ve subscribed to just a few communities on other instances to keep resource use modest.
I run a personal instance with only two human users and a couple of accounts each (admin and daily use). I use a DigitalOcean droplet with 2gb of memory and 80Gb of storage. With a dozen or so communities, my disk usage since July 4 is at about 12gb.
My total monthly cost with weekly backups is about $14 USD. If the storage demands keep going up, my cost will increase to about $19/month
It’s a great idea! Would the ActivityPub protocol contain enough user information as-is? I think it does.
I’m using my Lemmy instance as a personal blog/extension of my LinkedIn. I control the instance and have it kind of locked down policy-wise.
Over time as I master the administration I will post maker projects and other personal projects. So the only thing that keeps you from doing it is how you use lemmy. LinkedIn is unique among “social” medias in that your verified real name and identity is associated with your profile. Nothing stops you from associating your real self with your lemmy account and completely controlling a single instance.
I’m pursuing a hybrid approach. I cross link my LinkedIn with my personal sites so people who find one can easily find the other. I’m at a stage in my career where recruiters actually are welcome because they bring genuine opportunities for my somewhat specialized background.
It’s all an experiment and it will take time to see if it’s worthwhile. In the meantime, I enjoy watching Lemmy grow and learning how to manage my own online persona.