Is there any benefit to host my own instance?
I run my own instance, the benefit is privacy and reliability. Everything is controlled on your own server. You also aren’t reliant on someone else running an instance that could go down at any time, either permanently or an outage. Been a problem with Lemmy.ml recently.
You also aren’t reliant on someone else running an instance that could go down at any time, either permanently or an outage.
You have to worry about it yourself though.
A balancing act for sure. I’m torn on the topic. With some much excitement right now but so little history there’s a lot of uncertainty where to “plant your flag”. Part of me wants to setup my own instance simply so I maintain control of my identity should .world suddenly disappear. On the other hand now I have the responsibility of making sure I don’t make myself disappear. The mental debate will continue.
I think for now it’s so early it doesn’t matter all that much. Just have fun! You can make multiple accounts so why not
Yea but if you host with a major cloud server provider you’re basically having 100% uptime because they very very rarely go down and so the only issues would be stuff you’d have to deal with.
I was asking myself a question, if you comment like you did here Is it saved in the server on which the original post is, or is it saved on your server?
Kind of both. His server has a mirror of the community. When he comments it gets saved on his server and the his server communicates with the original server. In turn the original server also communicates his comment with other federated servers.
If data is migrated from server to server, as the community grows in size, the data to be maintained on each server also grows in size? Also i’ve seen some servers allow the creation of new users/communities, but some don’t… whats the point of that if the data is just replicated anyway?
I believe it is saved first on the instance you’re signed up for, then gets pushed around the network using the Activity pub protocol. So it eventually ends up being stored across many instances of it has far enough reach.
How is your RAM/storage usage? I’m interested in setting up my own instance (no communities, just a username that will always be here) but don’t want to upgrade my VPS again. I already had to do that spinning up a Mastodon server.
I’m up to about 300MB of disk usage after a day of hosting my own. Curious to see how it grows.
haha better than the 12GB and rising of my single-user Mastodon instance. And this is with deleting my media cache every night.
Mastodon is aggressive with caching media. Akkoma is more lightweight
The pictures folder on my instance is at 1.3GB. It’s just me and my friend. About how many communities are you subscribed to?
- Some of those are lemmy.ml and not a lot of comments, etc have synced yet.
Gotcha, thanks. I’m at about 70 so that makes sense then.
Up to 400MB after two days here. I took a look at the code and it looks like Lemmy keeps all ActivityPub JSON for 6 months. It would be nice if it was possible to shorten that.
I’m still happy that I’m hosting my own instance, but I hope this thing doesn’t get too big!
For personal use, even a Raspberry Pi is sufficient.
I did. The benefits as I see them:
- I can still use Lemmy if the instance I would have used as my “home instance” ever went down.
- Even if a public instance doesn’t go down, all this extra load is making strange bugs surface that I don’t encounter (I still have the live refresh bug everyone has, but not this one).
- I have full control over my account.
- If I ever want to get to customizing my UI later, I can.
- Content I create originates on my instance, and I have full control over it. I can’t stop other instances from caching what I post publicly, but this still gives me more data governance.
- I can curate my “All” tab to only show stuff I actually want to see, instead of trying to figure out how to block communities (not sure if that’s possible for regular users).
- I get a custom domain which I think is pretty neat.
I wonder if it’s possible to migrate those Reddit datasets and import them into our own Lemmy instance
I’ve wondered the same. I know I’m not the only one with the 1.8 TB Reddit data dump. It would be cool to import all that into a Lemmy instance.
Regular users can block communities and instances both.
From what I’ve seen and read, server to server traffic is less taxing on instances than client to server. So even if your instance is JUST you, it would be your instance talking to everything else so it would have some net benefit on the federation. But it would take a lot of users self-hosting solo instances for this to help in any noticeable way, I’d think.
There is certainly no downside to running a solo instance, if you’re even slightly interested I would say go for it!
It’s only less taxing if it’s multiple ppl on an instance.
If every solo user spun up an instance just for themselves there wouldn’t be a benefit over all those users just signing up directly to an existing instance.
Eg 5 users on instance b trying to access instance a Is better then 5 users each with their own instance trying to access instance a.
Wouldn’t it still be a bit less taxing even with only one user? If I’m not mistaken then your instance only initially requests a community/post/comment from another instance when you specifically search for it. After that your server gets updates through activities pushed by the other instance. So if you refresh a post multiple times those requests only go to your instance. It somewhat acts like a cache, while the other instance can push activities at it’s own pace instead of being hammered with requests. Of course multiple users per instance would still be better.
It acts like a cache, yes, but now the other instance has to send a push to keep every user’s instance updated, whereas if there were only a few instances with lots of users only a few instances needed to get updated.
I did it. So far I’ve noticed a few things, for example you have to populate/federate the communities yourself, and it can take a long time. It took hours to retrieve and catch up all the lemmy.world posts. I expect it to be an ongoing thing. When you first connect to a community, it downloads the first 20 posts, but all the comments are empty.
The plus side though is it is very fast for me. And nobody can delete my profile.
Do the comments ever load reliably? For me that would be a dealbreaker…
You gotta remember, The blackout brought us refugees I don’t think lemmy planned for this. I think the updates that are coming will address all of this. Reddit is decades old. Lemmy is new to all of us. We just gotta wait and eventually it will become second nature and we will be as good as Reddit
Oh totally. It wasn’t a knock at the software at all. In fact. I’m surprised by how well this works as a drop-in replacement for Reddit for me and both Lemmy and Kbin are solid.
The reason I asked was that, with my single-user Mastodon instance, likes/boosts and comments are nearly always incomplete on my server just because of the way federation works. I was just wondering if that was something smaller instances had to deal with in perpetuity or if it was just a one-off issue that happened at the start.
The OP commented below saying that comments appeared to be loading instantaneously after that initial hiccup.
Cool. Hope you get it resolved
As far as I can tell yes. Once the federation catches up the backlog, comments and posts seem to be near instantaneous.
They do seem to. I’m on my own instance. Sometimes it seems a bit funky though it usually seems to be when I’ve just subscribed.
I like running my own too, and agree it’s a bit of a chore to get content.
I feel the biggest hurdle is finding communities. I wish the instance would automatically index communities from federated instances. I don’t mean track posts/comments, just keep a record of the communities existence.
Looking them up elsewhere, then searching locally, waiting for it to work, then subscribing is a bit of work and I’ve only bothered with about 10 so far.
In my navigation of the fediverse the last few days I’ve noticed a few people running instances of mastodon and lemmy with just themselves or 1 or 2 other people etc.
If you into tinkering and selfhosting, why not :D Means you’re in full control of what other instances you federate with/can see etc.
Appreciate if you guys shared some guides on setting it up. I’m not new to selfhosting but tried setting it up and failed with strange errors all day long :(
I would suggest joining us on the Lemmy matrix space, particularly the “Lemmy Instance Admin” channel. It’s much easier to help in semi-real time.
Not sure if you got it sorted or not, but if you were following the docker-compose method documented by the devs, there were a couple hurdles I ran into. The one that may be relevant here is that at some point their
docker-compose.ymldid not expose the Lemmy backend to the Internet, and so all federation was failing. That said, I checked just now and they seem to have fixed that issue upstream. So you should be able to re-pull theirdocker-compose.ymland it should work.I will try that, thank you.
No worries, this is a fairly complex piece of software. If you really want to though, try copy pasting your errors into chatgpt if you can. While not perfect, it usually can give you an idea of what steps are going wrong. Some of us can help you too, but it’s no pressure. Being a part of the community is more than just the machines, it’s the friends we made along the way.
I think it would be better if @[email protected] would post the errors so the solution to his problems is documented in case someone else has a similar problem.
This way we could google problems and just add lemmy instead of reddit to find a proper solution.
Of course, the most important aspect of fixing a problem, is writing down how you fixed it. Never know what a different, but similar problem might crop up again. Sometimes getting a quick answer, or having a human readable explanation for an error goes a long way. Often enough I’ll have complex logs entries that I can’t parse what the problem actually is, I can quick copy paste and get a normal people paragraph. Sometimes “os: error (-4) aborting” actually just means you forgot to change user permissions on your volume folder. In a perfect world, all program’s logs would be perfectly readable by machines and people at the same time. :P
It was mainly around this error: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2278
I started my own instance and do currently not intend to open it for others (besides, maybe, close friends and family).
My intention are
- to learn more about the concepts
- evaluate how reliable the replication of comments and posts works
- maybe create my own pseudo-community just for myself, as kind of a simplified blog
Reading other posts in this sub, I saw it is still seen as offloading the main servers, as the replication of the data is a low load compared to serving the UI. Maybe one of these motivations apply to you, too? Or you find another one? At the end of the day, host your own instance if you want to :-)
Is there a tutorial or something out there? I’ve got no background in any of this but would like to maybe give it a go myself at some point. Would you be willing to say how much it costs as well?
Depends, what do you mean with “no background in any of this”? I started yesterday and set up the instance within 3h, starting around 1h after I saw the name “Lemmy” the first time. I still have to iron out some issues.
But I do have a strong background with docker, Linux administration, networking, and generally DevOps, and I do have a virtual root server up and running for some time.
If you have no background in docker and Linux (administration), I would say you’d do better focusing on smaller things, running some servers locally in docker and so on. There should be lots of opportunities to have a quick success to build up on.
If you have that background already and only have no background in the topics of Fediverse and Lemmy, https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html provides some relatively easy to follow instructions.
The costs are basically the costs of an always on Linux server, preferably with a fixed IP address. I’m not sure what you would pay wherever you live, I pay ~15€/month for 8GB, 4 cores, virtual root server with my own domain name.
But I do have a strong background with docker, Linux administration, networking, and generally DevOps, and I do have a virtual root server up and running for some time.
By no background I mean nothing in any of that at all 😂. The only mildly relevant thing I have a background in is bioinformatics but even that’s a stretch…
However, I did also have 0 background in 3D modelling, 3D printing or handwiring keyboards and now I’ve made quite a few that all work so… We’ll see! (I guess lol)
Well, just for playing around you should be able to set it up using something like dyndns on a laptop at home, at no cost (except for time). If you want to go for it, that’s what I would suggest :-) When that works, think about getting the virtual-root-server at monthly costs…
I host my own instance, but I like selfhosting as a hobby. I really love having all my account/login stuff on my own hardware and my own backups. If I break something, its just my own stuff that broken, no harm done to any other users. I don’t really plan on hosting any of my own communities, just participating in others. I’m an avid seflhoster, and my setup is pretty exotic compared to the vast majority of hosters, but I got the whole thing working perfectly over a day. Much better than when I tried to get mastodon working. More power to more fediverse stuff though.
Everything is under your control, you’ll never be collateral damage. Cooler username?
I feel that speed is the biggest benefit. I was on kbin.social and in the beginning everything was fine, but after a while when they got more and more users it was terrible. Every second click led me to cloudflare sometimes even with the capcha.
On my own instance now since yesterday everything is so fast! I chose lemmy because it’s written in Rust and I have the feeling that it will be more resourceful and with less bugs than /kbin because of that ^^
Yeah, I’m running on an instance of just me and my wife, biggest downside is needing to subscribe to communities before we get content, but its sooo much faster.
I almost think this is a blessing because you don’t get so overwhelmed with stuff you don’t care about and only see what you’re looking for. But yes the UI for it is not very good yet.
I’ve taken to just blocking the more popular communities I don’t care about, like sports stuff
Once I subbed to a few things now it seems my all feed gets content from servers and communities I’m not subscribed too. Just took a bit. Mostly from smaller foreign ones right now tho.
Running my own instance using AWS’s free tier for now, though I think I’ll keep it after. It makes scaling soo easy and simple if my instance ever takes off. Which I don’t know if it ever will lol. The reason why I even created one is to actually use my domain name for something rather than keep paying for a domain that I’ll never use for anything.
Which of the free AWS ones did you choose. I just had a look and there are lots of different ones which is best for lemmy?
I’m using a t2.micro instance which I think is best for a small instance like mine, but I think there are other options you can look into with different RAM and CPU.
Yes, big instances are not ready to handle the traffic and could go down - see lemmy.ml
Been trying to find out how; kinda funny googling it brings up reddit links on a protesting reddit sub.
I’m selfhosting Lemmy and its SUPER fast. Just think of it more of a personal caching layer than anything else.
Oh yeah, your instance is fast. That’s nice! What hardware are you running on?
Just the cheapest Digital Ocean instance that is on a 2 core CPU. It helps that its just me on there, so I don’t have to share with anyone… yet.
I’ve been looking to do the same for the many pros I’ve seen posted here, but maybe someone can give me some clarity on a very big downside to me.
From my understanding most instances are pretty liberal with federating anyone, then blacklisting bad actots or problematic instances. However as adoption grows is there not the potential for larger instances to move towards a whitelist, and possibly move towards only federating with known, established instances or ones with established conditions? Possibly flat out banning personal instances due to moderation overhead?
Perhaps my understanding is incorrect, but seems to me that there could be a big future risk your personal server turns into an island and all of your past engagement is no longer in your control.
I’m with you. I think the comparison to email that a lotnof people have been doing works well. I can see lots of hoops to jump through to maintain federation.
The analogy works to some extent, but it is a gross oversimplifications in most regards. But yeah, keeping up with maintaining a small mail server if you expect not to continually end up in SPAM is a royal pain.
Will be interesting to see how it develops. Could see a movement towards RBL type block lists, but with the lack of tools available at the moment I think most admins are going to end up having to take some pretty drastic actions at times.
