1y ago

Hello, World!

First post from my new, self-hosted, personal instance. Feels good!

123 comments

Congratulation 🌞
Greetings from another personal instance 🐱
- And another. Consider https://github.com/fmstrat/lcs and LPP. 😉
- 🙏

Nice work dad. How difficult was it? I’ve been thinking about going down that road but concerned about the overhead.
- If you host the instance just for your own account to be under your control there's hardly any overhead. I'm running it in docker in a debian 12 VM with 1 GB ram, 1 virtual CPU and 50GB virtual disk. Haven't had any issues.
  
  This is valuable info. Is there a Docker image that's preconfigured for it or did you install on a LAMP image or other third way?
- If you do end up going for it, Lemmy Easy Deploy is the tool I used and it’s awesome. I had no success with any other guide.
  It was pretty easy with that tool. The overhead isn’t too bad but I recommend not going below 2GB of memory. I rode along on 1GB for a little while to see how things went, and it topped out quite a bit. I pay a little extra for automatic backups too which is worth the peace of mind. It’s about ~$18/month with Digital Ocean.
  
  Damn. I paid racknerds $25/yr for 2cpu and 2.5gb of RAM. Runs great, and rather lean to be honest.
- I found this website to be pretty helpful in terms of walking you through a docker- based install:
  https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/running-a-lemmy-social-networking-instance-using-docker-compose.html
  The official docs are a little sparse at times.
- Well, I couldn't figure out Docker because I'm a newb, so I decided to give the app in Yunohost a try. I was reluctant at first, because when I last checked the available version of Lemmy was kind of old and image uploads were broken. However, when I checked today, the version was 0.18.2 and the disclaimer about the broken feature was gone. So, I gave it a try and it just worked. I do still have to test image uploads.
  We'll see about overhead. I've got it running on a VM to which I've allocated 500GB. The VM is on an older i5 desktop with 16GB of RAM. I've already been running a Pixelfed instance for a couple of weeks and so far so good.
  
  That should be plenty of power and storage. I’m running on a Digital Ocean droplet that has 2GB of memory, 25GB disk space, and an Intel vCPU (the “premium” option). Hums right along.
  
  Great to know, I'm on yunohost and considered creating my own instance. I guess I'll get to that when I take the step from rented VPS to home-run server.

The secret ingredient was crime
- Was?
- It usually is.

Welcome to the club! I used the same easy deploy setup as you! Makes life really easy eh :)
Furthermore, to populate All, I have this one running: https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
If you do this, you will need some extra space because the database will grow, but I think it solves one of the (largest) downsides of running your own instance, namely discovering other communities.
- Thank you; bookmarked.
  
  When you decide to set it up, you need to create a user on your instance and fill in those details in the command line to run the thing. Also make sure to change the instance name to your name, otherwise it will not work.
  Other useful commands:
  docker rm --force lemmy-subscriber-bot To actually destroy the docker container if you want to start over
  docker logs lemmy-subscriber-bot To see if the thing is running and doing things.
- Do you know how much disk space this will roughly use? Are we talking 10GB or 100GB or 1TB? Just roughly speaking.
  
  Mine went from 8 gb to 20-ish gb. So not that much ;)
- Thank you for the info. I set my instance up yesterday as well and my goal today was to do this.
- Just so you know, this also creates more load on other instances, especially the larger ones.
  
  Hmmm that is not really the small instances “fault”, but that is the idea of the Fediverse…

Nice! Just me on my instance too. The only downside I've found so far is that I have to discover new communities in my own since there is no one else to populate "All".
Small price to pay to have control over my instance though.
- this is just a quick script I came up with, but it will show you newest communities and their descriptions. It refreshes daily. maybe it will be helpful for discovering niche communities : https://lemmyfind.quex.cc/
- I'm really thinking about spinning up my own instant. I joined lemmy.one a while ago and it dark at the moment. After reddit I'm not digging the lack of control... Do you have any recommendations for running your own instant?
  
  I host it on a VPS since I was hesitant about having something like this hosted at home. As far as spinning it up, it was relatively straightforward using the docker instructions (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html).
  I ran into some issues with the postfix container not being able to send emails, but it turned out I just needed to ask my VPS provider to unblock port 25 for SMTP.
- Yeah it was a bit annoying at first, but I just created a "all" user that just subbed to everything (well not everything, shout-out to all the communities that speak another language). I don't recall exact links but if you just search for "all bot Lemmy" there are some stuff people have made which will just auto join basically all communities in an instance

I appreciate all of the weird instance names in here
- Hehe I needed a login for a Superbowl pool with my kid's preschool and that's what I came up with. When my wife saw she couldn't stop laughing, so it stuck.
- Same.

Welcome!
How hard was it to set up? I've been considering making my own personal instance for a while now but haven't fully properly looked into it
- I am running Yunohost, which made it very easy. However, I suspect that uploading images might (still) be broken.
  
  Thanks, I'll check that out then.
- https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy might be the easiest way for selfhost

hi, please ignore this comment i am testing my lemmy instance.
- I will not ignore your comment, take that! Lol
- I'm gonna respond so your server crashes. :p

It's pretty awesome, ain't it?
- Yes!

Welcome aboard, and hello from across the Fediverse!

Been on my own instance all month and it’s been smooth sailing for me!

Hello from another self hosted instance comrade!
- Welcome from linz.city!
- Hello from a third self hosted instance comrads!

Good on you for standing up your own instance. It's certainly nothing to shake a stick at and you're coming in at the right time when Lemmy just got a big performance boost in v0.18.3 as well as an 80% reduction size in the PostgreSQL database. Good things are happening.
- Did the v0.18.3 update of Lemmy really result in an 80% reduction in size in the PostgreSQL database? How did they manage to do it?

Hello from another personal instance :)

Also posting from my own instance! Lemmy verse let’s gooooo

Hello from my self hosted kbin!

Hello from another self-hosted instance! Having absolute control on what you see is very nice.

I still need to look into self-hosting Lemmy some time, but alas, it takes time lol
I'm even more tempted now that lemmy.one, my main instance I was using, appears to be down with a database issue according to its API. Which of course means if they don't have working backups, it may actually just be gone forever, along with my post history there.
- ❤️ not sure if they're chatting on matrix or not.
- Shame, I was considering using them since the idea of having an instance with no community creation to save on bandwidth was an interesting concept and I needed to get out of lemmy.world because of its stability issues

printf "%s\n" "Hello, CrimeDad!"

ayyyyy!

hello there! I just got my instance up and running as well. Thanks to the help in the matrix channels for lemmy.

♥️

There are dozens of us!

Hello self hosted person.

Even better from the right one!

Hello from another self hosted instance! Also using Lemmy Community Seeder to populate my All feed and help in discovering new communities. Lemmy Community Seeder

Welcome to the club.

Hello from my personal instance, and welcome!

Is e-mail working properly for you?
- Yes. I have a residential connection with a dynamic IP, so the trick for me was to use an SMTP relay with a trustworthy provider. That said, I don't really use it.
  
  i did the same thing using fastmail but the emails either come not at all or super delayed, would you mind sharing your provider?
- I'm trying to use the provided email service from my website provider OVH, I have the setup ok (webmail works) but I can't set up Lemmy to use it :-/

Nice work!
Greetings from my instance 😄
- I love sh.itjust.works!
  
  Haha thought i was on my other account 😅

Nice work and welcome to the club!

Congrats!

Just try not to get ddosed ok m8?
- Yeah, I definitely have a lot to learn in terms of self-hosting self-defense.
  
  What are you running for your firewall? I've been curious about self hosting a Lemmy instance (currently have a few services like Plex, Minecraft, pihole, etc) but do worry about security

Welcome! Another fellow self-hoster checking in ✅

Also joined the club today :)

This sounds like a fun project to be honest. Are there any risks involved by getting bad content through federation that’s out of your control?
Just a week or so ago I read an article about a guy running a tor exit node personally and being held responsible for the traffic
- It only pulls from communities you have subscribed to. Images aren't duplicated per server, just text; so even if you find something nasty it's not hosted by you and you can always delete comments from the database/block users from appearing in your instance.
  
  Tangential - is there any reason a private instance couldn't just not run a pictrs container? Especially if you're not creating communities on your instance.
- If you block porn-related instances suchas lemmynsfw and pornlemmy, you'll drastically reduce your chance of getting CSAM contents on your instance. Not saying those instances promotes that kind of stuff, but many dubious instances (the ones with kiddie/doll banners) federate with them, and might post bad stuff when the mods aren't looking.
  If you're still super worried about it, you can host your instance behind cloudflare and enable their CSAM scanning tool.
  
  Has anybody managed to get CyberTipline credentials for the CSAM scanning tool? I filled out their form and never heard back.
- I am not completely sure about the risks here, but I think as the sole user on my instance they are pretty low. I think the only way content gets onto my machine is if I post it, if I interact with content on other instances, or if I create a community to which other people from other instances start posting. Despite my handle, there are some crimes I don't do. I should be okay as long as I don't mess with illegal content myself and moderate accordingly others' behavior in my communities.
  
  Yeah pretty much.

Nice work :)

feddit.ie checking in!

But why?
- Why does Kirk climb a mountain?
  Because it's there!
- For fun, mostly.

You did it! Hello, and welcome to the club. Lemmy has been my first foray into hosting a site on a VPS and it's been quite the rabbit-hole; for the better of course. I hope you have fun.