what is better for single user instance, or maybe something small like under 10 users (no communities)? which is lighter on resources? how much storage should I allocate?

any alternatives to lemmy and kbin that are still somewhat similar?

22 points
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While I quite enjoy the Interface of KBin over Lemmy. It seems Lemmy uses a lot less resources based on the “Admin Guides” for each service.

Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration.html

KBin: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/wiki#user-content-admin-guide

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15 points

My Lemmy instance is currently occupying about 350MB of RAM, but you can round that up to 400MB. A lot less than the 4GB for KBin.Technically it’s a dual user instance now, since a friend wanted to join it and I said sure.

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0 points

Thanks for the info! what about storage capacity usage?

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8 points

After almost 24 hours, coming up on 662MB of images, and 371MB for the postegres database. Though, I could see the numbers fluctuating depending on how much stuff you’re subscribed to. I’m currently subscribed to 31 communities, most of them fairly large.

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3 points

BeeHaw.org admin said like a week ago they were only up to 25GB.

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5 points

Damn, this is so much worse than good ol’ RSS for just following up stuff (which I imagine is the main argument to be made for a single-usee instance)

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1 point

yeah for real I have been thinking the same lol. sadly a feed reader is just a reader. Would not be able to comment or post, which is the main reason I will go with a self hosted instance.

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15 points

The arguments for are varied. I don’t have to worry about any admins making decisions on federation, I can federate (or not) however I please. I have my own space that I can do what I want with in a familiar format, and I can make my username Jamie without it being taken.

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1 point

Keep in mind as php-fpm (used by Kbin) launches multiple child processes instead of a single rust process like Lemmy. The number of child processes can be tuned down to reduce RAM usage if necessary.

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5 points

Yeah, kbin seems to be a php8 service vs a compiled rust service from some lite poking.

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6 points

I’m definitely interested in seeing how the single-user instance offerings develop across the various federated applications. I have no interest in taking on the role of admin or moderator for people I don’t know personally, but am more than happy to run my own front-end service that’ll let me lurk and interact with all varieties of ActivityPub content.

For now it seems kbin might win that fight for me since it’s equipped to handle reddit-style communities and threads while also providing a workable microblog interface. But it does seem to be a bit on the heavy side… I wonder if we might see some software created for this particular usage scenario one day, if it isn’t already being worked on somewhere.

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6 points

If big instances like Beehaw go whitelist federation only, it will effectively make single user instances useless.

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5 points

Certainly a possibility, but I don’t really expect it to be a common concern. Defederation is mostly about keeping problematic people out when an instance’s admins either can’t or won’t resolve whatever problem is at play. Most instances will never even realize a single-user instance is lurking at all if they don’t bother to crawl the logs and said user doesn’t cause a scene.

I’d expect most whitelist-only instances will have been that way from the start instead of growing large and then shutting the door, because the goals of running an instance like that are fundamentally different.

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1 point

Yeah, I think a whitelist only instance would to dramatically limit its users to be generally attractive for most people, and would certainly keep it from becoming popular. They are surely use cases for it but pretty limited I’d imagine.

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3 points

Right now they went the other way around, so the big instances are blocked and we with our single user ones can still federate with them.

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1 point

The barrier to entry for making a new instance is relatively high compared to the barrier for entry for making an account on a free for all instance, so I doubt it will be an issue.

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3 points

I have had no success yet trying to run kbin behind traefik, so I am on lemmy right now. Works pretty well actually.

However I don’t seem to be able to subscribe to kbin magazines. I can see lemmy sending out the follow message to the kbin servers’ inbox, no error messages, but no activity from the kbin server follows up and it stays at ‘subscription pending’.

Tried it with quite a few kbin instances. Does it work for someone else? Trying to find the reason why they do not like my lemmy instance.

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2 points

I’ve been trying to debug this as well so it’s not just you.

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2 points
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However I don’t seem to be able to subscribe to kbin magazines. I can see lemmy sending out the follow message to the kbin servers’ inbox, no error messages, but no activity from the kbin server follows up and it stays at ‘subscription pending’.

Same here. I haven’t been able to fully subscribe to anything on Kbin. Running my own lemmy instance and I get the magazine added as a community and get the magazine description but subscribing never returns anything. I re-try every once in a while but noting so far. I assume it will be fixed sometime in the future. I may just set up a kbin instance as well but I don’t want to manage both.

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1 point

I’ve been able to today.

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1 point

I really want to self-host Kbin, since I like the interface and approach of it a bit more than Lemmy. But since building the docker images failed on my Homelab, I spun up a fresh Ubuntu LTS 22 Server at my hoster and ran through the Admin Docs again… sitting here still after 15 Minutes it trying to build the PHP image and it does not seem to make any progress. I wish we could pull the images and run it without building them ourselves. But kbin is in its early stages, maybe someone will push built images to a registry in the future.

If this runs for another hour without any progress I guess I will call it a day and try Lemmy next.

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7 points

@cyclohexane I think this should be merged today with a bit of luck: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/143

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2 points

That’s great, glad to see progress on simplifying deployment!

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0 points

Really glad to see this, will make deployment much easier.

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