First post from my new, self-hosted, personal instance. Feels good!
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?
There’s a few Docker images, since it needs a database and some other services, and the best practice with Docker is one container per service. The documentation is here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html
I removed the Nginx server from the docker-compose.yml though. I already had an Nginx server running on the same server, so I just added the config to the existing server instead.
I also installed my private server and setting everything up was quite easy :) I left nginx as is and just put everything behind my Caddy as reverse proxy
I’ve been meaning to try Caddy and Traefik. I’ve been using Nginx for so long and don’t really have a reason to switch though.
For Lemmy, I didn’t see a major advantage of running a reverse proxy behind another reverse proxy which is why I’m not running Lemmy’s Nginx container.
I went with docker but back then their documentation for it was trash and hardly worked. Had to trial and error it until it was functional. Hopefully they fixed that by now.
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.
Wow, killer price! I need to check that out. I’ve had my Digital Ocean account for so long I’m on autopilot lmao.
There’s a whole community around finding affordable hosting for a variety of use cases. https://lowendtalk.com/ I found my current provider there and on Black Friday they were offering an exclusive lowendtalk deal (called the 6666) where I pay $66 every 2 years and get 6gb ram 6vcpus and 66GB disk and 6tb transfer on a 10gbps line. these smaller hosts won’t have all the same features digital ocean and vultr have like 1-click templates.
I honestly don’t really need any of the 1-click stuff. I pretty much live in the command line, so the main thing is bringing down cost for the future.
That’s a really good deal! Thanks for the heads up. I’m gonna start looking around.
I found out about it here. There was a thread a few weeks back. Search for racknerds in this community.
I think they’re still running their 4th of July special.
Link to low cost VPS hosting offers: https://quex.cc/post/29783
Link to low cost VPS hosting offers: https://quex.cc/post/29783
Thanks for this link! I’m on Vultr, which is good, but it’s around $7 a month with only 25GB of storage. Think I’ll pick up one of the Ethernet Servers deals.
I found this website to be pretty helpful in terms of walking you through a docker- based install:
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.
Excellent instance name
Thank you! I’m happy with it lol. It’s kinda funny knowing that I paid for the domain enjoying.yachts. I’m glad it was at least cheap!
Oh good! That is reassuring.
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.
From the readme:
As of the writing of this tool, and size of the fediverse (Jul 2023), using this tool, may result in disk space usage of around 2GiB/day, according to my own metrics.
Seems kind of steep. I only have 500GB allocated to my server. I feel like there’s got to be a better way.
I have the feeling that this is extremely exaggerated. I only have 40 Gb in total and still have 23 gb free. I don’t run the tool constantly, but run it every once in a while to make sure that my All has interesting communities. If it would be 2 gb/day I would be loooooong over my 40…
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 ;)
The latest really improves things space wise and cleans up better. Single instance here for almost a month. About 50-60 subscription’s and am at 2gb db size
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.
I started mine at home but quickly came to the same decision as you and moved it out to a VPS.
I use Amazon SES for mail relay.
Thank you for the link. I may try hosting it at home just for kicks.
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
Been on my own instance all month and it’s been smooth sailing for me!
Welcome aboard, and hello from across the Fediverse!
Hello from another self hosted instance comrade!
Hello from a third self hosted instance comrads!
Welcome from linz.city!
It’s pretty awesome, ain’t it?
Yes!
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 :)
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.
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
❤️ not sure if they’re chatting on matrix or not.
