Self hosted instances
I am considering creating my own lemmy instance as my current instance (lemmy.world) is often down, and I enjoy this kind of a project. That being said I haven’t been able to find any resources on hw needed for this? If I have a raspberry pi 4b 8g with 128gb is that enough for just me using it? Do I need to pay for a cloud server to host it? How can federation work if I only have <10 users tops? Anything else I might need to know?
The only comment I'd add here is that you should make sure you have a real domain, that you've paid actual money to, when setting this up. ActivityPub assumes the domain is immutable, and the free dynamic domain names you can get (or free TLDs like, say, .ml was) are a bad choice. Spend the $10 or whatever, because if something happens to your domain name, you cannot just update it in the database and fix federation: it completely breaks everything in a way that's not repairable.
Shit good to know.
Hello! I did the same thing, and this is my first post on my instance!
I just put it on an old computer with 8GB of RAM, a HDD, and an old i5. Its running great so far.
One disapointment for me is viewing "all". Since im the only one on my instance, the only communities I see are the ones im subscribed to. Let me know if you find a way around this please!
I've heard instances are using some sort of bot to "discover" communities
Indeed. !test@mylemmy.win is my community for, well, testing. It has 63 subscribers. One is me, the rest are bots that managed to find the community.
GitHub Link for one of those bots, which mentions in the README that there are similar bots here and here
I was using this for getting content to my instance: https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
About the same hardware, works wonders (especially after migrating to 0.18.3).
I used this bot to populate lemmy.fan - it works well, runs within a container/portainer stack, and the logs show everything when it runs.
This is awesome! Can't wait to give it a try, thank you!
Can you elaborate on the issue with viewing all? If I just want to scroll and see stuff will I be bc able to see anything across the fediverse that I am federated with or is it really only stuff I am subbed to?
Servers only receive content from communities that at least one user on them is subbed to. Servers do not download the entire fediverse, only the bare minimum to cover what the users on it have asked for.
I've had mine up since 6/15 and in total between attachments, DB, and misc other stuff it uses just under 30 GB of space. I've also ran one of the subscriber bots for a couple days so there's who knows how many communities subscribed in total at this point.
Between the major parts, the DB is about 6GB the rest is attachments and such that could be wiped without any real harm. I'm hoping to see a 'purge data after X days' function at some point, or even better a 'after last interaction' so active posts don't get purged. No use keeping the data from some some simple meme that had 2 comments forever though.
Lemmy doesn't require a lot of resources to run smoothly, especially for instances with a low number of users. The only concern may be if you upload a lot of images, they are stored on your drive.
If you don't want to manage a single user instance you can join someone's instance (like mine, I am the only one in my instance)
I've found the biggest thing isn't any real resource. My instance runs on a core 2 duo with 4GB of RAM, and I really try to get it to waste memory and barely fill the 4GB.
The thing is your instance will be blasted by all the other instances you subscribe to. If you subscribe to too many big communities you might find you're locked out during peak times, but it should be just fine as long as you're not crazy with follows like I am lol
that should be easily enough. My instance after a month and subbed to 120 communities is using about 1-2gb of disk space. 18.3 did a ton of work in performance.
I was originally going to host my instance on my own hardware but decided to use a $6/mo droplet on DigitalOcean. Seems to work well enough for me and my LCS bot. Picked up a domain off Google Domains for $20/year or so. It's been a fun project and I've learned a lot along the way.
Consider object storage for pictures, that's all I can say. That, and the community seeder bot is extremely helpful.
Is there a guide on setting up object storage?
It's thru pictrs, but yes. This is a solid guide that explains how to do it out of the box without migration. https://literature.cafe/post/67882 <- (copy this link into the search of your instance, it'll federate it over)
As far as I know, there is no current arm Docker image for your Raspi 4. You could rent a cloud server. E.g. Hetzner. I use the CX21. It runs very efficiently for me.
You're welcome to join my https://dmv.pub Kbin instance. It federates with Lemmy.
I run my instance on a Quartz 64 with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. Works just fine.
On my instance there are two users, one being myself and the other one beein a seeder bot. It automatically pulls top communities and posts from other instances to keep the feed fresh. For this I wrote my own script, if you’d like to have it I can post it here or you can just use an already available project like this: LCS
Like that my post is always full with enough posts to keep me reading.