I tried earlier today and I had no luck actually getting an instance running
It would help if the explanation was specific to a raspberry pi
Do yourself a favour and don’t host it, yet. Lemmy is not quality software. You have 3 options here:
- pay someone to take care of it for you
- learn more about computer management and computers in general, first; then host it
- ignore the first two options, which will inevitably lead to your instance crashing and burning
Best of luck!
Crashing and burning (in a non-production environment) is an excellent motivator to develop necessary skills; being unafraid to break things and fix them when they inevitably break helps you get a deeper understanding of how the systems work, for what it’s worth.
Agree with others here. Ansible isn’t for beginners and neither is a Lemmy instance.
Try some other projects first, maybe some docker containers that involve a reverse proxy.
For example, NextCloud is a very useful thing to set up as a project, but I would say that you specifically need the new Pi 5 with plenty of RAM for that. The Pi 4 doesn’t handle a full NextCloud installation well.
You tried what exactly earlier today?
I was following the steps on the Lemmy-ansible github page
And which step in this process did you get stuck, and what were the errors, if any?
You gotta give us some more info here.
Step 7. I dont have the errors now but I don’t think I had ansible or ssh set up correctly
I dont really understand it as this is the first thing I am trying to selfhost other than a minecraft server.
I’ve replied to a different comment in this thread about what happened already
Needlessly dismissive for someone who needs help. Yes he is probably in over his head but who hasn’t been.
As a self taught self-hosting enthusiast i wouldn’t recommend ansible to a beginner. I know that sounds backwards as absible makes everything easy and does all the work for you but that’s also part of the problem. It would be like jumping behind the wheel of a self driving car without knowing how to drive at all. When (not if) something goes wrong it could go wrong hard and you’d lose the whole instance.
It’s better to start with some other self hosted projects that interest you to get a feel for the process and software like docker then work your way up to bigger things like lemmy. I consider myself fairly versed in the process and lemmy still gave me some issues to set up and my pixelfed instance still won’t federate despite my best efforts. I’m pretty sure i know the issue, i just need to get around to fixing it.
Last thought, the raspberry pi is a pretty impressive little pc for it’s size and price point but you might find yourself quickly burning through resources depending on the number of active users you have and how heavily you use it.
Could you give somd examples of something to selfhost? I am only really aware of selfhosting lemmy and other fediverse stuff
So, I’m not new to this (omg it’s been 6+ years now wtf) but I don’t host a lot of stuff, and it’s been pretty easy to poke at; I’ve got:
- plex
- minecraft (bedrock and java)
- freshrss
- rustdesk
- home assistant
- vaultwarden
- pihole
- actual (budget software)
Running in docker containers, along with a few of the built-in plug-and-play services on my nas. Of that list, plex, minecraft, freshrss, rustdesk, and vaultwarden were very easy to setup in my situation. Rustdesk is a really good remote control program/service, vaultwarden is a fork of the bitwarden server, and plex was almost comically simple to get going as a media host.
You could set up a dns based ad-blocker like pihole and a vpn like wireguard to tunnel your phone back into your home network so you have ad-blocking on the go, too. That’s a semi beginner protect with plenty of tutorials to pick from.
You could run nextcloud, syncthing, or immich to make your own cloud at home but that might need more than a basic pi setup.
Find some nerd and offer him feet pics to do it for you. Thats how I handle most of life’s problems.
