First post from my new, self-hosted, personal instance. Feels good!
Congratulation 🌞
Greetings from another personal instance 🐱
And another. Consider https://github.com/fmstrat/lcs and LPP. 😉
Nice work dad. How difficult was it? I’ve been thinking about going down that road but concerned about the overhead.
If you host the instance just for your own account to be under your control there’s hardly any overhead. I’m running it in docker in a debian 12 VM with 1 GB ram, 1 virtual CPU and 50GB virtual disk. Haven’t had any issues.
This is valuable info. Is there a Docker image that’s preconfigured for it or did you install on a LAMP image or other third way?
There’s a few Docker images, since it needs a database and some other services, and the best practice with Docker is one container per service. The documentation is here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html
I removed the Nginx server from the docker-compose.yml though. I already had an Nginx server running on the same server, so I just added the config to the existing server instead.
If you do end up going for it, Lemmy Easy Deploy is the tool I used and it’s awesome. I had no success with any other guide.
It was pretty easy with that tool. The overhead isn’t too bad but I recommend not going below 2GB of memory. I rode along on 1GB for a little while to see how things went, and it topped out quite a bit. I pay a little extra for automatic backups too which is worth the peace of mind. It’s about ~$18/month with Digital Ocean.
Damn. I paid racknerds $25/yr for 2cpu and 2.5gb of RAM. Runs great, and rather lean to be honest.
Wow, killer price! I need to check that out. I’ve had my Digital Ocean account for so long I’m on autopilot lmao.
I found this website to be pretty helpful in terms of walking you through a docker- based install:
The official docs are a little sparse at times.
Well, I couldn’t figure out Docker because I’m a newb, so I decided to give the app in Yunohost a try. I was reluctant at first, because when I last checked the available version of Lemmy was kind of old and image uploads were broken. However, when I checked today, the version was 0.18.2 and the disclaimer about the broken feature was gone. So, I gave it a try and it just worked. I do still have to test image uploads.
We’ll see about overhead. I’ve got it running on a VM to which I’ve allocated 500GB. The VM is on an older i5 desktop with 16GB of RAM. I’ve already been running a Pixelfed instance for a couple of weeks and so far so good.
That should be plenty of power and storage. I’m running on a Digital Ocean droplet that has 2GB of memory, 25GB disk space, and an Intel vCPU (the “premium” option). Hums right along.
The secret ingredient was crime
Welcome to the club! I used the same easy deploy setup as you! Makes life really easy eh :)
Furthermore, to populate All, I have this one running: https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
If you do this, you will need some extra space because the database will grow, but I think it solves one of the (largest) downsides of running your own instance, namely discovering other communities.
When you decide to set it up, you need to create a user on your instance and fill in those details in the command line to run the thing. Also make sure to change the instance name to your name, otherwise it will not work.
Other useful commands:
docker rm --force lemmy-subscriber-bot To actually destroy the docker container if you want to start over
docker logs lemmy-subscriber-bot To see if the thing is running and doing things.
From the readme:
As of the writing of this tool, and size of the fediverse (Jul 2023), using this tool, may result in disk space usage of around 2GiB/day, according to my own metrics.
Seems kind of steep. I only have 500GB allocated to my server. I feel like there’s got to be a better way.
Do you know how much disk space this will roughly use? Are we talking 10GB or 100GB or 1TB? Just roughly speaking.
Just so you know, this also creates more load on other instances, especially the larger ones.
Nice! Just me on my instance too. The only downside I’ve found so far is that I have to discover new communities in my own since there is no one else to populate “All”.
Small price to pay to have control over my instance though.
this is just a quick script I came up with, but it will show you newest communities and their descriptions. It refreshes daily. maybe it will be helpful for discovering niche communities : https://lemmyfind.quex.cc/
I’m really thinking about spinning up my own instant. I joined lemmy.one a while ago and it dark at the moment. After reddit I’m not digging the lack of control… Do you have any recommendations for running your own instant?
I host it on a VPS since I was hesitant about having something like this hosted at home. As far as spinning it up, it was relatively straightforward using the docker instructions (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html).
I ran into some issues with the postfix container not being able to send emails, but it turned out I just needed to ask my VPS provider to unblock port 25 for SMTP.
Yeah it was a bit annoying at first, but I just created a “all” user that just subbed to everything (well not everything, shout-out to all the communities that speak another language). I don’t recall exact links but if you just search for “all bot Lemmy” there are some stuff people have made which will just auto join basically all communities in an instance
