2y ago

If you want to host and manage your own Lemmy instance but are intimidated by the technical requirements, I can help!

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.

22 comments

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.
- Amazon has a very generous free tier for outgoing email in SES, and it is pretty easy to set up.

Do you think it would be possible to host using a raspberry pi 4?
How much traffic does Lemmy create daily?
- I run lemmy.studio on a VPS with 1GB of ram and 1 VCPU, so a raspi4 should suffice, at least initially. Bandwidth is around 7.5 Mbps.
- 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.
- I think for a small number of users, yes.

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.

An up to date step by step instruction for docker, ansible, or scratch setup would be a fantastic step in the right direction. I'm not a complete moron, but I feel the current guides are lacking. There's a lot of assumptions on the admins knowledge of the associated systems beforehand. As someone else said, the first to make a turnkey solution... hot dog. Would absolutely blast adoption into space.

Being a highly technical guy, I struggled to get everything running on the server that I am hosting other things on. The biggest hurdle was letsencrypt, but other things weren't working quite right. I ended up just paying for a new ubuntu vps so I can run the ansible playbook (I use arch linux everywhere else). That turned out to be super simple and "just worked".

Hi there - thanks for posting. I’m serving lemmy (ansible install) on nginx from Ubuntu 22.04 and I’m seeing this weird problem sometimes where the submit button is not enabled on the “create post” form. Sometimes it works but then it inexplicably stubbornly refuses to - I am not seeing any apparent error show up in the console, nothing in the lemmy or nginx logs (naturally, because the HTML form isn’t submitting to the server because the submit button's disabled). Happens in different browsers, tried restarting nginx, rebooting, nothing seems to fix it. Now, my addled brain does recall seeing something about Ubuntu 22.04 having some issues with Lemmy and perhaps that’s what I’m seeing - it’s just weird and I’ve never seen a web app do this before - any ideas? The url is quex.cc and you’re welcome to test there if you like, but I'm really just looking for any suggestions for investigation before I start thinking about moving to a different OS.
- Open a bug ticket on the lemmy-ui Github. Every issue should be tracked
  
  yes, good suggestion, thank you - although before I do I'm going to spend a bit of time to see if I can isolate the problem - I just tested it from a mobile device and the local PC browser and it's working now. I used the exact same url, text and everything to create the post and I didn't change anything - didn't reboot, didn't even restart the browser. Except for the fact that it's intermittent, it looks like some kind of js or css problem, but I need to replicate it and if I do that, I'll probably be able to figure it out.

I've been playing with my own single-user instance here using Docker. Mostly I just followed the Lemmy docs. It's been nice & responsive and takes barely any resources, so far. I think this system can really benefit from a lot of small instances to spread the load.

Something that would help a lot of selfhoster types would be prebuild docker images and a good example docker compose. (something kbin could also use)

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

22 comments