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Should I host my own instance if I don't intend to run a community? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

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[–] 18 points 3 years ago (21 children)

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.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    My raspberry pi 4 is using 810mb of RAM and 11gb of file system space.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    That's interesting to read. Could an instance be added to an existing setup? (Debian OS)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago*

    So long as you can run Docker, I would think that you could setup an instance. You just need to make sure that the image you use for lemmy and lemmy-ui are compatible with your platform. I had to alter the provided docker-compose.yml file to use arm64 versions for my RaspberryPi.

    I mentioned the total disk usage for the sake of setting up a pi. I don't know what the space requirements are for lemmy separate from the bulkiness of an Ubuntu 22.04 install.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    I’m up to about 300MB of disk usage after a day of hosting my own. Curious to see how it grows.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    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!

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Yes that's right, an instance is constantly accumulating data over time, however instances that aren't the origin instance have the option of going back and deleting old posts (manually in the DB) but then their users wouldn't be able to see them anymore. I do get the concern though, if things really start to pickup and we get insane volume, I'm afraid even my instance wouldn't be able to pick up. I'd have to unsubscribe from everything. On the other hand, I think people will come up with solutions as things scale. There's a lot of unknowns right now, too many to build a solution. Just take a look at mastodon and how its model has changed over time.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago*

    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.

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