I want to self host my own lemmy instance for personal use. I have seen there Github page and it is really easy to set up but I have some questions?
- How will I be able to federate with other instances?
- Will I be able to interact with communities from other instances?
- What type of hardware will be required to self host?
- And finally is it worth to run our own instance?
1: If you have it public facing with a valid SSL certificate for the domain it’s hosted at then it should work fine.
2: Yes, I have no actual communities on my own box but here I am :)
3: I’d say the biggest thing is storage for attachments if it’s the only thing running on the box. Mine is set to offload all the attachments to a separate storage box, but if the mastodon instance is any indication it could balloon to a pretty large storage amount over time.
4: It’s relatively easy and you have all the powers of an admin to shape your experience to be what you want. There’s the responsibility to deal with moderation and maintenance, but if you’re the only one using it then there’s nobody to be upset if it goes down for a bit here and there.
It should federate automatically as long as you have it enabled. You won’t see anything in all until at least one person on your instance subscribes to communities.
I used this script: https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
I have mine running on a $6 vps from vultr, it doesn’t really need much power if you’re not hosting a lot of users and communities.
- Yes.
- Yes.
- You can do it quite cheaply. It is feasible to run on a ~$5/mo VPS (Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean, Scaleway, etc) if you are willing to suffer potential downtime if things go wrong on that one machine. Eventually you might run out of image storage, but that can offloaded to any object storage provider such as those offered by the cloud hosts I listed or ones run by e.g. AWS (S3), Wasabi, Cloudflare (R2), etc.
- If you know nothing about servers, linux, docker, postgres, reverse proxies, netwroking, http, etc. then it may not be worth it to you. I like the idea of having complete control over what servers I federate with. I like the idea of having a built-in archive of everything I read and write on Lemmy. Running an instance is of minimal cost to me because I already run software (including postgres, the database Lemmy uses as well as my own email server) for myself so it is low impact to add just one more service. Ultimately there are so many variables that you have to decide it for yourself.
If you want some general advice on how to set things up or certain things you need to make sure are done right so your instance works feel free to reach out. If you want to check out a smaller instance (I am the only regular user, but have a few friends that use my instance from time to time) feel free to sign up for mine to see what it might be like.
I mean, lots of providers have free trials (including some of the ones I mentioned), that 4Cx24G instance will cost like $100/mo (which is pretty competitive TBF) and you get a $300 credit for signing up… Oracle’s actual free tier is 2 VMs with 1/8Cx1GB each (which is pretty neat).
Also, I would just never consider Oracle for cloud hosting or anything else, because fuck Oracle. They’re worse than IBM. Larry Ellison is a lawnmower.
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.
