I am a software developer by craft and a linux system admin by hobby. I cannot commit to moderating and managing my own instance, but I would be glad to help someone with the technical aspects.
The most common complaint I saw in Reddit and here about switching to Lemmy is the difficulty of setting it up, so I thought I would help bridge this gap.
While I have never hosted my own instance before, I already checked the setup guide and it looks pretty simple to me, so I am confident I can do it. Please feel free to comment or DM.
It would be great if you can comment general questions. I can then respond to you here and maybe others will see it and know how to host their own instances too.
I feel like there’s a lot of money on the table for the first person to set up a turnkey hosting platform for Lemmy. Something like MoltenHosting but for Lemmy instead of Foundry.
There’s similar things for mastodon and a project currently in alpha/beta for multiple platforms, incl Lemmy, called spacehost.
See mastodon post here https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109905703584075719
See their main rep on the fediverse here: https://atomicpoet.org/users/atomicpoet and https://calckey.social/@atomicpoet (@atomicpoet@calckey.social @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org).
They also admin calckey.social.
I haven’t checked but are kbin instances easier to spin up? Kbin is be able to communicate with Lemmy communities without a problem.
My two cents, I had a wobbly Lemmy instance setup that couldn’t do HTTPS, federation, and stay stable all at once. It was always 1 or 2 of those 3 at best.
Switched my instance to kbin, which took about a half hour of CLI and after that has been a joy. It’s just younger and admittedly less feature packed right now.
It’s easy from the docker from what I can tell, the bare metal / vps is a bit more as more manual pieces but nothing too crazy. I just submitted a pull request for the admin guide so that should help a bit for less head bashing… Though my instance doesn’t seem to be federating so that’s a new problem for tomorrow.
Perhaps write a thread, with step-by-step text and photos/screenshots per platform? And then the next one to do would be a step-by-step video?
Example, I’m not technically minded, but have an Unraid box with a 1Gb connection. There are extra steps there that I’m aware of but have no idea how to do because it’s over my head.
A more detailed set up guide would be great! I feel like some details were missing from the Lemmy guide.
Here’s an example of how to build it from scratch. https://lemmy.grouchysysadmin.com/comment/7413
Thanks for offering your knowledge! I successfully set up and instance using their docker installation guide. However I was never able to get the smtp server to work. I first tried to add postfix to the docker-compose file like they have in the ansible installation example on github, but that didn’t work. Just trying to add an email address to my account would stall the UI with a spinning animation on the Save button. I then tried to update the hjson config file by adding my sendgrid api credentials and removing postfix from docker compose. That gave me the same result. At that point I kinda gave up and deleted my vps. I don’t have access to my error logs anymore, but I can spin up a new vps to try to get the same errors again if needed.
A lot of VPS providers block port 25 (and other email ports) because they don’t want people to set up bot spam mail servers on their services. Could that be the issue?
I’m using a VPS with Hetzner. I’ll have to look up if it’s blocked. Thanks for the info.
If you have Cloudflare you can set up an email alias for incoming email and then create a secondary Gmail address on top of your existing one for outgoing email. If you go to ‘Settings > Accounts and Import > Send mail as’ and add another email address (not an alias) with the same email as the one you setup on Cloudflare (noreply@yourdomain.com). You will likely need to create a Gmail app password to sign into the email server if you use 2FA.
Once you’ve created this email Gmail will send you a confirmation email to confirm it’s all working. Then you can just enter Google’s SMTP server info for Lemmy along with your email you used to login to the SMTP server when you added a new email in Gmail settings (your actual email, not the CF one), and the app password you created.
If done it this way for a few services beyond Lemmy and it’s worked well so far. This way you’re also using a Gmail account technically so you can hopefully avoid blacklists and spam filters.
Do you think it would be possible to host using a raspberry pi 4?
How much traffic does Lemmy create daily?
CPU requirements for Lemmy hosting are minimal. Memory is useful - you’d want to use the Pi 4 with either the 4GB or 8GB RAM, anything less than that will work but you’ll be running the risk of difficulties if the server gets busy.
You’ll also need plenty of storage, especially if people are going to start uploading media to your Lemmy host. Given that a Pi runs off an SD card you might well find yourself running out of storage space - I’d recommend attaching a USB storage device for the reassurance in that respect.
