this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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At this point I'm considering it. I wonder how much it costs.
I did it, but my buddy has a server with extra resources that he doesn't care if I use and I already owned domains.
Say $20/yr for domain, Lemmy needs around 150MB of RAM and almost no CPU. You could easily do that for $5/mo. Slice up the domain renewal, call it $8.
So far, there are upsides and downsides.
The upsides, I can federate with anyone I want and it's unlikely that they'll defederate with me because I'm one guy, and maybe a handful of friends if they want accounts. Two, I wanted something I could use as a blog anyway, so I made a mod only community on my instance where I can blog. I don't care if people read it or not, it just seemed fun.
Downside, finding communities is relatively more laborious. I have to go to other instances and look at their communities, or all feeds, to find things to subscribe to at home. Which means for each one, I need to copy the link or name, go to my instance's search, then go to the communities tab and subscribe. On a big instance, someone probably already searched for a lot of communities at least once, which is enough to index it. But on your own, you gotta do it yourself and it can get a little tedious.
Overall, I'm liking running my own though, so I plan to keep doing that.
Discoverability is one of the biggest weaknesses Lemmy has right now. It should be entirely fixable, though. A way to auto-index the list of communities on a given instance would be a great start.
Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.
I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.
Doing it in a federated way.
Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community from what I hear and that sucks.
I can completely understand why that wouldn't be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.
I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.
*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.
Last I checked there were 10k communities and a few hundred instances total, which is tiny in computer terms. As it grows larger maybe it would be an issue, but really even millions of instance names properly compressed shouldn't be onerous for a one-time download.
150 MB of RAM is a bit optimistic. However I agree that you should be okish with cheap 1GB 1vCPU VMs for a one user instance.
Maybe even host it on an old laptop you can use as a server.
The 150MB metric was based on the documentation estimate. I would say that remains correct for my solo instance. The only caveat would be that postegres adds, at current, about 200MB of usage on top of that. Nginx and postfix add just about nothing memory-wise.
This may bloat up over time, or if I had a bunch of users I'm certain it would, but we're not really talking about hosting large communities in this case, so I'd say 512MB of RAM with no other software could probably do the trick as a bare minimum. For those hosting proper communities, 100% future proof and go bigger than that.
In my case I started with 4GB but had to double because there seems to be some memory creep / leak that gets reset when you reboot the server.
Of course, I'm hosting 50 active users and communities with over 200 subscribers.
Overall I would say that Lemmy is indeed lightweight.
I've got the domains already - I have a bad habit of buying domains that I never use. It's really the server part that gets me nervous. I'm not good at that stuff yet, and it's not really intuitive for me to learn. I know for Mastodon, they have some cloud based servers that they recommend, but Lemmy's instructions are kinda lacking detail for a newbie like me - and at this time, there's not really up-to-date YT videos showing you how to do it.
I know that being part of a server seems like a natural fit for someone like me who is totally lost with these things, but it's kinda frustrating that most larger instances have a ton of rules. I think the one I'm on has rules about lewd content, which is fine, but I feel like one of my comments got blocked from submission when I wrote about how Reddit's downfall will be similar to Tumblr's due to their likely eventual banning of that type of content. Maybe some of the words I used were triggering the auto filter or something? But either way, I didn't like that feeling of censorship.
There's a guy working on a runs-out-of-the-box Kubernetes install.
Cool! I'll probably go down that route then when it's ready.
I didn't mention the install process in my case, because the box I installed on already had Apache, which conflicted with nginx, and I couldn't get an equivelant apache config working correctly. So in my case, it took extra steps where I migrated everything from apache to nginx on the box, and stopped using apache. But I did the install using ansible to connect from my PC to the server, and the install process itself wasn't bad. Copy pasted the config files and made a few relevant changes like DB password, instance name, default admin credentials, and pointing to my existing SMTP mail service. For a personal instance, you could probably exclude that last step though. I already host email for my domain, so the effort to do the extra and make it work was miniscule.
After the config changes, I just put things where the lemmy-ansible repo asked, and ran it as directed. Aside from a few screwups on my part, which were mostly because I was trying to see if I could make Apache work, the install wasn't too bad. Ansible did the heavy lifting, and if I was installing on a fresh server, I have little doubt it would have given me trouble at all.
If you ever decide to go through with trying, feel free to reach out to me. I'll be happy to help as much as I can.
I'm using a $6 a month digital ocean droplet. Should be plenty of juice for me and my friends.
That looks neat! I'll look into it. How does it work, do you run Docker in it? I really have no clue what I'm doing.
Im currently with contabo and got an vps for 6โฌ a month with 8 gb of ram and 200gb ssd. I'm quite happy with it