this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
507 points (95.7% liked)

Selfhosted

39940 readers
693 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Congratulation 🌞

Greetings from another personal instance 🐱

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

And another. Consider https://github.com/fmstrat/lcs and LPP. πŸ˜‰

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Nice work dad. How difficult was it? I’ve been thinking about going down that road but concerned about the overhead.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Damn. I paid racknerds $25/yr for 2cpu and 2.5gb of RAM. Runs great, and rather lean to be honest.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Wow, killer price! I need to check that out. I’ve had my Digital Ocean account for so long I’m on autopilot lmao.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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 β€œpremium” option). Hums right along.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The secret ingredient was crime

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It usually is.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you know how much disk space this will roughly use? Are we talking 10GB or 100GB or 1TB? Just roughly speaking.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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?

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I appreciate all of the weird instance names in here

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am running Yunohost, which made it very easy. However, I suspect that uploading images might (still) be broken.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

hi, please ignore this comment i am testing my lemmy instance.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I will not ignore your comment, take that! Lol

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm gonna respond so your server crashes. :p

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Welcome aboard, and hello from across the Fediverse!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's pretty awesome, ain't it?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hello from another self hosted instance comrade!

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Hello from another personal instance :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Hello from my self hosted kbin!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

β™₯️

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Even better from the right one!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

There are dozens of us!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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

load more comments
view more: next β€Ί