1y ago

Self hosting a Lemmy instance for just myself?

Heya, I'm trying out Lemmy and kinda like the idea of hosting a Lemmy instance just for me.

I was wondering:

What are the hardware/bandwidth requirements for a single user instance?
I know different instances can black list each other, but can they whitelist each other too? I don't want to be automatically unable to see interact with certain instances.
Has anyone else done this and have thoughts to share?
What about doing the same for Mastodon?

26 comments

I have both a misskey and lemmy instance. For both I used https://servarica.com/ with the cheapest summer deal Flying Fish SSD. It's like 55 a year. (Or you can pay monthly but I'd highly suggest to save up and pay yearly) (kinda lie, I got a bigger one for lemmy but it's overkill)
If you have never installed software before on a VPS (virtual private server) you're in for a learning ride. If this is the case, be patient, don't give up.
Misskey is similar to mastadon. You can also look into calkey which is similar to misskey.
The hardest part of setting it up was the settings. But since I already know Docker and whatever it was easy going otherwise.
Though I still don't have email working... Bleh
Misskey you add relays. Relays are like lists of instances to join in the fediverse. You then block instances you don't like.
Lemmy, you block instances you don't approve and can set it up so you can white list as well.
Also important, lemmy doesn't automatically add other instances. How it works is, any user on your instances has to subscribe to another using the full search key !blah@domain.tld then once ONE user is subscribed, everyone else can search it via keyword.
Because of that I created a bot that went through all my approved instances and subscribed to all communities in there. It stopped around 3500 subscribed communities. I'll have to run it again sometime.
- What kind of network traffic and disk usage are you seeing with 3500 incoming communities?
  
  My personal instance that is pulling in close to the top 500 communities. Over the past week I see about 4 million requests and 17GB data served.
  
  Good question. Right now it just says 0... With my all but 2 users. The great thing about where I got my servers is you can choose one of two options 100mbps unlimited (which I use) or 1gps for the first 4tb and then throttled to 10mbps.
  So far I see very little impact
- Awesome answer! I appreciate the insight

Lemmy’s allowlist feature is generally recommended against. It limits federation to only that list, which makes discoverability harder than it already is.
For a self-serving instance, it’s more tenable to use a blocklist and federate normally.

In case of Lemmy I used Lemmy-Easy-Deploy script. To host I used Oracle Cloud always free tier. Its risky because I've heard people say that since its free they can just pull the plug at any time, so you might consider to upgrade it to paid account, I heard its cheap. About requirements I have no idea. Im running my on a VM instance with Ubuntu minimal 22.04 aarch64. I pushed it to the maximum allowed for free account: 4 ARM cpu with 24Gb of Ram. I dont know anything about hosting mastodon.
- Just make sure you keep regular backups of your data so you can spin it up somewhere else.
  Also, people can crap all over Oracle (rightfully so), but I highly doubt they would kill the free tier one day w/o any warning at all.
- Lemmy-Easy-Deploy is awesome, and yes, Oracle will burn you eventually, and you won't be able to access your instance to run one of the migrate scripts to move elsewhere. Everything will be permanently gone.
  Check out Hetzner instead. They have reasonable prices and DCs in both the EU and the US. They also just started offering ARM servers as well.

https://github.com/jheidecker/lemmony
This will take care of the other commenters point about having to manually subscribe to everything. I just had it pull the top 500 communities from the top two instances and I'm fine...

Doing this, running on a VPS with 1GB of RAM perfectly fine. No whitelisting required but you will have to manually subscribe to everything you want to see, so such thing as a proper "all" feed since this only shows feeds that users of your instance are subscribed to. Subscriptions are a bit weird, you want to search for the full URL of a sublemmy, then try it again after some minutes for it to work since it has to be fetched first. The ansible playbook is ridiculously easy to use for deployment.
Mastodon is a different beast, from what I saw so far, this needs much more configuration effort for deployment.

I'm doing both on the cheapest VPS on Hetzner, but needed to add more hard drive space, especially mastodon needs a lot.
- I haven't run up my own Threadiverse server yet, but I self-host my own one-person Mastodon, also on Hetzner. Yes, it will eat up a lot of disk space, so if you're trying to keep costs down you need to send all the media to S3-compatible storage. I use Backblaze B2 which costs me something like $2/month for 200GB of Mastodon media.
  I would assume Lemmy or Kbin would also be greedy for asset storage, as they'll pull in media (images and videos) for any community you follow. So again pushing that all off to a low-cost storage system such as S3 makes a lot of sense.
  
  Not quite, most of the media is not pulled in from other servers but just linked to the original one from the browser, there are some circumstances where the media is copied but much less than mastodon.

Rather than setting up a VPS like some of you is there a reason I couldn't run this on my existing home unraid server?
- Yes im doing something similar but you should probably mask your home IP in some way using something like Cloudflare tunnels. Keep in mind the whole idea behind federation is you are advertising yourself to the fediverse.
- No, you can run it on your own homelab just fine. If you don't have it already, you just need a (usually free) dynamic subdomain so your instance have a normal URL instead of IP.
- Yes, but you'll need to do all the extra stuff required to get a domain name working.
- You can run it on Unraid using docker compose fine.

I took the easy way out for Mastodon with a managed host because I wanted to open it up to toher folks. But I did self host it for a bit and it was fine. Pleroma was a bit more to my liking, but Mastodon won out.
A couple of weeks ago, I did set up my Lemmy instance on a single core, 1GB RAM, 10GB HDD VPS. I'm not subscribed to a ton of communities and haven't bothered with the different seeding scripts. So far so good though! I'm really happy with it.

I host my personal instance on a beefier vps but it also hosts a few other tools I use. Lemmy is very slow and resource heavy to build but once running it's not terrible at hogging resources.

26 comments