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  • I host my own. Specifically for myself and those who are friends or friends of friends.

    I have a cluster of servers operating in my garage. Free real-estate for tons of stuff I want to host. I have to "pay" for electricity... the rest was already paid for long ago. My electricity cost for my whole cluster... is an estimated $1750 a year. But that cluster is 160 CPU cores, 750 GB of RAM, and ~400TB of storage. You ain't getting that on a cloud hosted provider for $145 a month. About $110 of that is subsidized by my business operations. I host email, websites, nextcloud, plex, etc... boatloads of stuff.

    • You offer paid hosting with hardware in your garage? I'm getting dot-com flashbacks!

      • I actually do... Yes... I have dual internet connections, dedicated power off both phases of my electricity with ~5 hours of battery backup, run redundant internal infrastructure (power, network, and server hardware)... I also have a massive backup library and am currently working on obtaining offsite backups solution. The whole site/house is also monitored with cameras.

        I have better uptime than some datacenters in my area have which I can truthfully quantify that as I also hold a CIO/CISO position in another company that operates out of a major Datacenter in my area.

        Edit: Should clarify, an offsite backup solution that ISN'T "just peer with backblaze or some other provider" to store your backups. I intend to do a rotating tape library. With one set of tapes always being off site.

        Also to mention... I have better uptime than AWS-east at this point of the year... Although there will be some outages of my infrastructure here soon for a network hardware update. I suspect something in the order of about 1 minute of downtime total.

    • I was wondering what Gilfoyle was up to these days

    • How does load balancing work across this fediverse.. if at all?

      • What kind of load balancing are you thinking about/looking for?

        If we look at Lemmy in specific...

        Jobs that a server performs for users on it's platform:
        Login services(are you even you to begin with?)
        Session Management (being logged in at multiple places, not mixing you up with other users...)
        Subscriptions (what content to even show you... organizing them on the page... etc.)
        Ban lists (and applying them to what you're looking at)
        Peering with the other platforms

        Jobs that a server performs for off platform users: Sending ActivityPub messages to the other user's platform.(effectively the same as "peering with other platforms" from above)

        The idea is that the jobs that the server has to do for it's local users is actually a lot more both numerically and in taxing tasks than the jobs that one particular instance has to do to send updates to the federated instances... A lot of the list in the first case is a boatload of SQL queries. The activitypub notification is effectively a broadcast of a relatively simple text that doesn't take much bandwidth.

        So let's look at actual cases now that we have some ideas of what instances are doing.

        I run a small instance, I have a few users (because I purposefully keep it small). If my users only ever interact with the fediverse through my instance, then other instances don't have to do most of the jobs in the top list. I've taken that load from lemmy.ml or other bigger instances that my users would have ultimately migrated to if they didn't have my server. The tradeoff is that my few users now cost the 1 connection for activitypub notifications.

        Lets look at a theoretical "perfect" setup... 2,000,000 users across let's say 1,000 instances. Evenly distributed. So each instance has 2,000 users. In that case, any given server would have to serve 2,000 people from the upper list and 999 activitypub broadcasts. This is significantly easier to do than have a single server try to handle all 2,000,000 users on a single instance serving nothing to the activitypub broadcasts.

        There's is one caveat with this... activitypub broadcasts will send everything that is subscribed... even if users don't actually view it. So there could be some waste. This then leads to the discussion of well how many users until there's a breakeven in cost of the first list vs the potential waste of the activitypub bandwidth. That answer is debatable... But most people agree that take the discussion seriously that the return on investment could be as low as 2-5 users. I think that the bandwidth cost outweighs the SQL (CPU, RAM, etc...) costs quite handily personally.

        Other useful functions that occurs with this setup... As long as I got the ActivityPub message on my server... my users can see all of Lemmy.ml's content. Regardless of if Lemmy.ml is actually running or not. We saw that with the downtime that some of the bigger servers are seeing, all the other instances could still consume the content... Just no updates were being sent.

        This is relatively simplistic... I've skipped some nitty gritty stuff... I've simplified some other stuff. But this is the gist.

        Edit: Other functions that you need to think about that lemmy is accomplishing for local instance users... Notifications, saved posts, language filtering, settings, profiles, avatars, reporting, slur filters, moderation, NSFW filters.. The top list is actually considerably larger... like I said we simplified.

    • Now you just need solar or something feeding a battery to cover most of your electricity costs.

  • I really like the overall concept of Lemmy, so I decided to set up lemm.ee to support the Lemmy network with my skillset. I have previously had the privilege of being responsible for running large platforms online (end-to-end, everything from operations to software engineering), and so far, this experience seems to be extremely relevant for running Lemmy in its current state.

    As for paying for hosting, my initial plan was to to just pay for everything myself as kind of a hobby, but the userbase at lemm.ee has been very gracious in first asking me several times to share costs, and then actually sending money once I set up donations. I'm not sure yet if this donations-based funding will be sustainable, or if it will fall off after the initial hype dies, but for now it's really awesome to see that there are several other people who believe in lemm.ee and want to share financial responsibility for it.

    • What does it actually cost? I have no basis for a ballpark guess even. I've seen this question asked to a number of admins and haven't seen a direct answer.

      It's hard to judge how sustainable a donation based approach is without that info.

      • The costs will vary wildly depending on how the instance has been set up. If you set up all necessary services on a single VPS (as is the most common approach for smaller instances), then you can probably get by on $10-$20 a month. Splitting different services onto different servers, adding backups, load balancing, CDNs, redundancy, caches, etc will quickly increase the cost. Bigger instances need more powerful servers, that will increase the cost further.

        On lemm.ee, we are currently not using very high-end servers, but we ARE using all the other things I mentioned above, and the monthly cost is currently hovering around $200 (that's for 3 servers, a managed database, object storage, load balancing, a global CDN, and an e-mail provider). This is still on the very cheap side in the grand scheme of running online platforms, but definitely much more than I would want to pay for a single-user instance for example.

    • I've been hosting a gaming server plus other related stuff myself for some years now.

      While the user base will definitely be different, relying solely on donations is unfortunately not sustainable long-term. Donations fluctuate massively based on time of year in my experience. So it's always good to periodically remind your community that lemm.ee needs donations to survive long-term.

      When I do those reminders, users come out of the woods in droves to donate. It's less that they're unwilling to donate and more that they just forget to donate.

    • That's great! It's kind of a crowdfunded instance, then. Makes me wonder if it would be feasible to implement some sort of collection box plugin or something...

      • Yes ... if anyone is a developer looking for ways to provide value to the fediverse ... I suspect the donation process is probably of high value.

        I don't know the best way for it to be done ... but something so that it's easy for users to setup a single or regular donation and easy for devs and admins to put the relevant button right into their platform ... all so that whoever is willing to donate has every opportunity to do so.

      • Yes, and I know it's counter to the core motivations of this movement, but probably need a centralized repository for donation that can be a universal door for funds that can then be distributed to vulnerable, but active, instances. Needs to be run by a collective of reps from instances meeting a minimum threshold of support for the community. Also needs to be nimble enough to revoke funding is an instance takes a hard evil turn.

        Or maybe just an app/site that recommends a distribution of a set monthly amount (e.g. 30 bucks) to the instances you use the most as a user?

  • I started !programming.dev because I am a moderator of several 100k+ subs over on Reddit and I didn't want my communities to not have a place to go if Reddit crashed and burned (even though it's incredibly unlikely). The main sub I moderated (/r/ExperiencedDevs) for years wanted user verification to combat the spam that was newbies commenting and posting about things they didn't really know or understand. This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn't really care about their communities.

    I am also a strong supporter of pulling control away from megacorps. We need more small to medium sized businesses on the planet.

    For selfish reasons? I wanted to work on something new and have true ownership over it, the ability to build a community that worked together to build something without capitalism standing in the way. It might seem strange, but one of the first things I did was bring multiple other people on board to help me maintain the server, even going so far as to add domain managers to the domain name. This was all to counter the major questions people were asking around "what if the host decides they don't want to host anymore?". Well hopefully the programming.dev community is willing to take that burden if the time ever comes, even though I hope it doesn't. I also wanted to start something similar to a coop, where ownership is shared, meaning users have incentives to make the platform better. I have lots of ideas around this, but this will never be possible on Reddit. It is quite feasible here.

    I also had the chance to buy an incredibly dope domain name! https://programming.dev! Why wouldn't I jump at that chance? And I get to even use it instead of let it flounder. So many reasons to host something like this, to build a trusting community, a safe space to have to let people talk about a shared love/topic/hobby.

    • Totally agree with the dope domain name. Not going to lie, a big reason for picking programming.dev was to be /u/jim@programming.dev

    • This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn’t really care about their communities.

      Just curious how you think you might go about this. Do you plan on contributing yourself, forking, or using the community to influence the direction/prioritization of new features?

    • Honestly the domain name is a fantastic choice; Much easier to feel comfortable sharing links to my colleagues from programming.dev than something like "shit just works" or "lemmy world"

  • We run ours, because we are two trans women that are fortunate enough to be able to afford to run an instance that specifically prioritises the needs of our community. It's a way of using our privilege to create safe community spaces

  • I already host my own stuff for the most part: emails, DNS, NextCloud, IRC server, IRC client (ZNC, The Lounge), my website and a few other things.

    I already pay like $50/mo for a dedicated server so that I have complete control over my data and my digital life, so adding a Lemmy instance to the mix is basically free. Just another VM among many of them, sharing the same resources as the rest of the stuff I host.

    I share my server with a few friends, and pretty much my friends and their friends are all free to use my stuff as well. Been doing that for about 14 years at this point: always let my friends put their PHP sites on my server and whatnot. A dozen people using my IRC bouncers, a handful of people on my IRC server. When people need a game server sometimes I hand them out a VM to run the server for a while, then when they're bored I turn it off and shelve it away. It's a lot nicer to foot the cost of a service when it's for people you know and care about.

    I'm a FullStack + DevOps engineer as my day job, so it's pretty trivial for me to set up and maintain. If anything it's a bit relaxing compared to the insanity I deal with at work.

    Regarding costs, the nice thing with distributed systems like Lemmy is that the average small to medium sized instance is really cheap to run. It's when you run into scaling problems as you grow that becomes painful and often expensive if you can't optimize the system. Suddenly you need way more servers, redundant databases, caching layers, spend a lot of time maintaining all of that, write automation to scale up more easily, etc.

    Without federation, the whole ecosystem would go down, it puts a lot of pressure and a lot of need in maintaining reliability and performance. With federation, if my node goes down for a day or two, only a handful of users will complain about it, and all is well.

    So in a way, many smaller instances distributes the cost of running the whole fediverse across many more people with much lower cost figures each, something one can afford to pay continuously even without taking in any donations. As I said, it cost me $50 for the whole server, but really I could probably run this on Oracle's free tier forever and never pay a dime for my Lemmy experience.

    • I'm very new here and curious if I could ask as it sounds like you know what you are talking about.

      My self hosting skills are extremely basic. I have an 8G Pi4 I run jellyfin, navidrome and a few other bits and bobs on. I'm scared of opening ports on my home network so use Timescale for external access. Could I run a personal Lemmy instance like this? Can I interact with other instances via Tailscale or do I need to actually open ports?

      Resource wise what would a personal instance require in the cloud? Would something basic like a 512mb 10G droplet from Digital Ocean suffice?

      • You could use a Cloudflare tunnel if you really wanted to avoid opening ports, but basically as long as you only open the right ports for what you want to host and have a good firewall (I use OPNSense) you're fine

      • You do need to allow incoming traffic, as the data is pushed to you by the remote server, not pulled from it.

        As @Hexarei@programming.dev said you could however use Cloudflare tunnels and it would work just fine, it just needs HTTPS.

        Experiment with it, have fun! Solving problems is how you learn that stuff 😃

        Otherwise yeah the 512MB droplet should be alright to start off, that's about what my instance uses.

  • I hosted ad-free invision and phpbb forums for almost a decade before the centralized services started. I do it because I like social media and understand the value of a vibrant commons. I've been working with computers since I was a child so hosting yet-another-app-server is not really that big of a deal and gives my users and myself a place we can call home on the internet.

    The out-of-pocket cost is minimal for a small instance, for larger instances scaling issues are going to hit eventually and costs will go beyond what 1-person will bear without complaint.

    Highly recommend more smaller instances.

    My server costs me only about $5 USD a month and I can host thousands of users without much additional effort (my sites before would usually run to ~10k users).

    **Tl;dr we do this because we want to, the act itself is often fulfillment. **

  • See this is good. The more the fediverse grows the more people find out what us old users have known for years and years:

    You don't need to rely on large tech companies. The web is for everyone.

    • It is pretty wild to think about how many people only know the internet as about 5 websites or apps..

  • I host my own instance for the same reason I self-host the dozens of other services. To have control over my digital services the best I can. I have a few server machines running various services. I run like 40 docker containers running at the moment. Lemmy is a set of those containers.

    It cost me the electricity cost to run the server, plus the cost of my internet. I suppose you should include the initial hardware cost- my servers are basically my old gaming rigs. Not to mention the time investment to maintain another service. For me, it's worth it to self-host if I can.

    Specifically for lemmy, I seen how overloaded the various major lemmy instances out there were, so self hosting could mean one less user on those instances. I also didn't see any significant drawbacks to self-hosting the instance since I can still join and communicate with all the other communities.

  • like many others, I hosted my own for a variety of reasons.

    • I like to tinker
    • this was a chance to do a lot of tinkering and get in on the "ground-floor" of something I think has a lot of potential
    • it gives me a bit more control over the experience, which is helpful when trying to get friends/family to give Lemmy a chance.

    As for the cost, I have several VPS's which cost ~$40/year, so the cost is basically negligible.

  • I'm hosting my own because it's fun and it's cheap to do it. I imagine it could get expensive to host bigger instances, and at that point the admins would likely look to donations to keep things going.

  • I love playing with computers. That's about it in general.

    I've been using Hetzner to get dedicated hosts before and I have had two mediocre servers as a playground for some time now so why not add another service to the stack, arr-I mean yeah

  • I chose to host my own instance for my community because I wanted to be independent from any other instances' administration, federation decisions or any sorts of politics.

    Right now I'm paying for it out of my own pocket, but I'm working towards setting up a donation flow.

  • Well the bigger ones do take donations, and its working out fine.. you can see the same thing working on other fediverse platforms

  • I host my own, and I already have servers for other reasons so there's effectively no extra cost because I can easily handle the load.

  • The "why" for me is "Why not?" - I wanted to give Lemmy a try, and I enjoy self hosting stuff! I also felt that opening an instance was the best way I could contribute, since my Rust skills are nowhere near good enough to work on Lemmy's backend and frontend was never my cup of tea.

    As for how I pay for it, well regardless of whether I ended up running Lemmy or not I already rent two dedicated servers as a way of "keeping up to date" with knowledge that comes in handy for where I work, so I have no intent on dropping them, and certainly not while I work here.

  • I was thinking of doing it so certain communities from the other place would feel welcome, but someone is domain squatting what I was planning

  • I host my own to act as the sister of my Mastodon instance. It's hard to afford given I'm a student, but it pays off knowing I'm on my little node of the decentralized internet.

  • Hosting my own instance on my server just because I can. And I have resources.

    If your ISP can give you publicly routed IP address - you can host it too, right from your home!

    • You should use cloudflare tunnel. Helps secure your server and doesn't matter if you don't have a static IP.

      • I shouldn't, but MAY.

        Also I recommend not to use it because relying on fourth party things for accessibility isn't good. Imagine what would happen when cloudflare will "experience technical difficulties" (c)(r)(tm).

  • It’s WAY faster than sharing an instance with normies. Think of it as your own personal caching server.

    As for payment, you sign up to a VPS provider and give them your credit card, and pay for the usage.

226 comments