silly judgemental post not meant to be taken too seriously (unless you agree with me in which case im dead serious)

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50 points

I run my own tiny instance so that I can feel special. And so that I can overspend on cloud infrastructure and stress out about uptime.

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16 points

beautiful human being

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6 points

How does federation work with hosting your own instance? Do you need to request federation with instances or is yes the default?

Was thinking of hosting my own instance just to tinker around with

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10 points
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Federation is open by default but I never post anything to my home instance because no one is there. If I started posting on my own instance other people could theoretically subscribe to my communities the same way I subscribe to communities on other instances but since there are only two users on my instance it’s pretty unlikely people would find it without me crossposting somewhere.

Benefits of me running my own instance are that I control my own user account and I’m not at the whims of another admin. I subscribe to content on lots of other instances and it all federates into mine which means I’ve been able to browse content when some of the big instances go down. I’ve got my own entrypoint to lemmy which feels a bit more neutral than choosing another instance to be ‘home’ for my user.

Downsides are that I have to pay for and maintain it myself which can sometimes be a serious pain. Because my instance only has two users my ‘all’ feed is basically a copy of my ‘subscribed’ feed plus a couple posts from communities that my wife subscribes to that I don’t. That can make it hard to find new content without using something like lemmyverse.net.

If you’re thinking about hosting your own instance I encourage you to give it a shot. I’d highly recommend the lemmy-ansible project on github which is both a guide and playbook for deploying the various lemmy docker containers using ansible. I’m a sysadmin by trade so running services like this is something I’m pretty familiar with but I’ve still found myself frustrated by Lemmy more than once. It’s still a young project and can be frustratingly brittle and difficult to troubleshoot. That being said it’s been a great learning experience and makes me feel like I’m doing my part to contribute to a better and more decentralized web.

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2 points

Some follow up, what are the costs related?

I assume you have to pay for a domain.

I already run my own media server from home and I have a spare PC, are you just saying the electrical costs or do you pay for server hosting?

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2 points

Great write up, thank you

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1 point

Because my instance only has two users my ‘local’ feed is basically a copy of my ‘subscribed’ feed plus a couple posts from communities that my wife subscribes to that I don’t.

But if you switch to “all” instead of subscribed and sort by active or hot you see the popular posts on all of lemmy, right? And you see all the communities under /communities link?

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4 points

Nothing manual required, you can federate with any other instance as long as you’re not on their ban list.

You basically use your instance’s search to search for a community on the remote instance, then your instance requests the top (5?) posts from the community on the remote instance. Once a user subscribes, all new posts going forward will be sent to your server via the federation.

At least I think that’s how it works, haha.

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2 points

How does lemmy run for you? I get weird blocks of bad gateway every once in a while

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1 point

It runs perfectly fine most of the time and then will occasionally lock up my entire server until I reboot.

I’ve been working on getting some better monitoring and log aggregation set up so I can troubleshoot what is actually happening but it’s a bit slow going. As of now I can’t tell if the database is getting overloaded, if the frontend is getting spammed, or what is going on really.

My instance has two users and it runs on a VPC with 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM.

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4 points
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lock up my entire server until i reboot

Check the ram usage on postgres. Theres a memory leak issue thats being monitored with a proposed fix in the next version (which is upgrading to the newer version of postgres)

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1 point

Same here! My background is in systems architecture, so I love this stuff.

Though I run mine on my own “private cloud”. Even though it sounds like an amateur operation I’ve got the proper safety nets in place (backups, redundant power, firewalls, etc). A lot of instances are public cloud which is cool and I have nothing against that, I just wanted to do something a little different.

I have no idea how to get people to join but I hope to have some friends in here some day :D

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