As the question states. I have the skiils and know how to setup a new instsnce and from looking through the documentation its relatively straight forward. Im just wondering would it actually help the fediverse and lemmy as a whole? There seems to already be plenty of instances to choose from. What are your guys thoughts?
There’s always going to be people that want to be on a smaller Instance, because it’s frankly an objectively superior experience unless you get unlucky with your admin. There’s really no major advantages to being on a large Instance. That I know of anyway, and I’m on one.
So, running a smaller Instance is probably always going to soak up some demand, so long as you advertise it a little bit.
One downside that I’ve run into is discovering communities. Your instance only gets updates from communities someone on that instance is subscribed to, so you’ll have to go to other instances to discover them.
My instance uses a seeder script that’ll do exactly that, but automated. It’ll check the most popular communities on the most popular servers and use an account to subscribe to them.
Boom, /all feed populated.
Did you guys make that script or is there a repo for it cause that would be very useful.
IMO the best communities serve a niche. Then you get a bunch of like minded members on one server and you end up with a local feed that is likely to be full of personally interesting stuff.
Would it make any sense to stand up my own instance, federated with what I want, follow the communities I want from other instances, and just ignore the rest? Is there any reason to not do that?
If you’re happy to pay whatever it costs to host then there’s no other disadvantage to this.
The only thing I can think of is if you somehow end up at odds with an admin of a big instance and they defederate your instance. Or perhaps in the future major instances decide to only federate with instances of a certain size, for some as of now unpredictable reason
Really, if your instance is just for you and your account (maybe a few friends, family), and you’re not running any communities on it (all your posts and comments are on other instances), there’s really no reason anyone would defed you. Unless you’re a dick.
I have to think that if your very small private instance was federated with a large public instance, your instance would pull down content from the public one. That’s bandwidth, and that’s costing the large instance some amount of money/performance. Because your small private instance isn’t “giving back” a level of content that the large instance would want or need, that could be the unpredictable reason you mentioned.
Now, I don’t see that being a real issue unless there are so many low-content instances that Large Instance reviews their usage and finds out that an unacceptably high portion of their bandwidth is being used by “leeches,” and wants to control cost.
Could even run the instance from your phone or whatever device used to look at Lemmy
Has anyone done that and documented it? I know android phones are sort of linux, but still, does need some modifications.
What does it realistically take to host that? Would one of them smaller Digitalocean droplets be enough, for example?
I run an instance on a 2 core 4gb vps, I think the disk space will be the thing that I’ll run out of
30 reg’d accounts and about 10 active users
I created mine because I am a systems engineer by trade and I moved on from Reddit. Nobody else has used my instance except for me, but I think it’s worth it. I like being in control of my own account and can be assured my instance wont impose rules that i dont agree with or worse, just disappear. If other people find it useful, then that’s even better.
How much storage does it take to host your own instance that’s federated with large servers? I am really curious about hosting my own instance but I don’t really understand how the storage works and don’t want my computer filled with thousands of strangers comments.
@bionicspud, I’ve been thinking of doing the same thing for the same reasons. How much storage does your instance use? I haven’t looked in to how asset caching works yet. It seems like it could easily get out of hand.
Running the Instance for 3 Days now. Added multiple new Subs and cleared pictrs (but not Postgres) folder yesterday. My instance is mostly used by me.
87M ./pictrs
335M ./postgres
Edit: Small update. Original Post was posted ~9AM. Now its ~11AM
112M ./pictrs
351M ./postgres
As far as i know, images shouldn’t be stored locally if not posted from the local instance. This looks to be a proxing problem as far as i understood.
what happens when you clear pictrs? you mean just deleting the folder? does that break stuff?
for comparison, my instance is only communities and no users (FAQ here: https://programming.dev/post/442419 )
it’s about 5 days old but not much activity
# du -h --max-depth=2 ./
73M ./volumes/postgres
7.8M ./volumes/pictrs
8.0K ./volumes/lemmy-ui
81M ./volumes
81M ./
the latest backup is only 7.4 MB zipped, I use this backup script
#! /bin/bash
# https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html#a-sample-backup-script
now=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H.%M.%S")
cd ~/lemmy && (docker-compose exec -T postgres pg_dumpall -c -U lemmy 1> dump.sql 2> dump.errors)
cd ~/lemmy && zip -r9 ~/bak-lemmy-$now.zip ./ --exclude "volumes/postgres/*"
rm -f ~/lemmy/dump.sql
like I said though, not much activity
and here’s how my backup zip files have grown in size over time
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_03.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_06.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_09.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_12.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_15.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_18.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_21.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_00.00.02.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_03.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_06.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_09.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_12.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_15.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_18.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_21.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_00.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_03.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_06.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_09.00.01.zip
6.8M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_12.00.01.zip
6.8M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_15.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_18.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_21.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_00.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_03.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_06.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_09.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_12.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_15.00.01.zip
7.4M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_18.00.01.zip
I like to tinker with software and thought a standing up an instance just for myself. Then you can keep your account, domain, communities, etc relatively static.
I think having various instances geographically distributed is also beneficial so popular instances can be offloaded a bit.
