Is there any benefit to host my own instance?
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’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.
less thing to worries like you dont need an email to use it from single user instance, lemmy now dont have 2nd authentication like totp at the moment and it may have risk to get pawned and leak your email address so yeah it is better to run your own single user instance
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 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
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!
So if I made my own Lemmy instance, and subscribed to !selfhosted, does that mean if Lemmy.world went down, the !selfhosted community is still up?
Yesterday I saw a beehaw (I think) community thread which got locked by the beehaw mods but because it was federated ppl on other instances could still comment. I think !selfhosted would be still be up on your instance if lemmy.world went down.
I believe that any posts and comments that were pulled and stored on your server will remain but new posts or comments will no longer federate. I’m actually not sure if new posts would be possible at all but you could always test it by setting up 2 servers.
Pros: you [sort of] own your Fediverse identity; you can make any changes to your instance you want (if you know how to do it); you’re in control of whom you peer with.
Cons: maintenance burdens (especially if you make any changes); content discovery complexity; possibly slightly less privacy (as you’re the only user of the instance, whatever is visible about it can be directly attributed to your activity). All solvable, of course.
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.
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.
The pictures folder on my instance is at 1.3GB after two days. 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.
If you host your own, do you need to establish federation with all other instances or only with the ones you want to use communities from?
If I only federate with lemmy.world, would I be able to see comments on /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world on my instance made by a user from lemmy.ml?
Would a user that reads /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world on lemmy.ml see my comments, if I only federate with lemmy.world?
I think it’s a matter of personal preference.
I’ve been running my own Mastodon instance for several months now, and I’ve enjoyed it. I don’t have to rely on someone else, either, which is nice. I’m in control of everything on that instance.
As for Lemmy, I just started my own instance today, and am currently writing you from it. What made me decide to setup my own instance was some performance issues I was seeing with Lemmy.world, although that might have been an UI problem. Anyway, I enjoy doing this stuff, so I’m running my own instance for the sake of doing it.
On the flip side, it’s more expensive and time consuming, and I’m the one who has to worry about backing up data, etc. Like I said, though, I enjoy doing it, so it’s no big deal.
I already have a nomad cluster in my homelab, running Lemmy is a no brainer.
As someone who likes having control over their data and especially backups, and someone who normally enjoys self-hosting things, I honestly might do it. I’m not sure if I’d want to host a lemmy instance or kbin instance though, since I know they all federate together anyway. I may also end up waiting until the software is more mature too before looking into it.
That’s awesome! Running my own social media instances has become a hobby for me.
Having my own Lemmy instance has felt fairly seamless versus using Lemmy.world, but there have been some kinks. For example, when attempting to subscribe to a new community, the server has to pull a bunch of data first. This takes several seconds, but the UI simply says “not found” – and then after several seconds, the UI updates with the community you want to follow. I figured this out by tailing the logs.
Also, the installation was pretty damn easy, especially when compared to Mastodon.
I’d maybe be interested in trying out self-hosting Mastodon at some point too, good to hear that Lemmy was easy to install though. I’m not too worried since I have quite a bit of Linux experience, I figure it probably won’t be too bad to setup whatever social media instances I’m interested in checking out.
Yeah, if you’ve got a decent amount of Linux experience, I don’t think you’ll have any issues. Mastodon’s installation is well-documented and works. My only criticism is that it’s a bit long and you have to be careful not to miss anything.
On the other hand, I recall installing Pixelfed back several months ago and having a difficult time. The documentation was lacking, and it required me to use Arch Linux, which I had never used. I was able to get it working, but eventually terminated the instance after a while because I was never using it.
Oof, yeah, requiring someone to use Arch definitely seems like a steep requirement lol
Yea, but then they can say “I use arch btw”. That’s what really matters in life.
I run my own Mastodon instance, but for Lemmy it seemed more logical to join an existing instance that aligned with my interests. I wouldn’t be adverse to abandoning my self-hosted Mastodon for a shared instance, but I would prefer a small instance run by and for people I know, rather than one of the huge ones.
What might make you want to ditch your self-hosted Mastodon instance?
With Lemmy, I didn’t feel a need to pick any specific instance because I can follow communities from anywhere, and it seems to work pretty well.
One downside I’ve encountered with my own Lemmy instance is that post and comment history in the communities I follow begins when I started following them on my new instance. New posts and comments are federated my way, going forward, but I don’t have the ability to go back and view as much history as one would on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, for example.
Can you tell me a bit about the process you went through to create your own instance? I’d like to make one myself.
You’re talking about Lemmy, right?
I provisioned an Ubuntu 22.02 server at Linode. I chose their 2 GB Shared CPU instance type. Once I configured the server to my liking, I ran through the Lemmy-Ansible instructions. (They have other methods, so check the documentation.)
Essentially, you install Ansible on your workstation. I’m on macOS and installed it via Homebrew. You then download their git repository, create the necessary configuration files, and then have Ansible configure the server. It was fairly simple.
I may go that route. I was wanting to host my own server but I feel like it would be easier to just use a cloud server
I have a lab at home and do host some stuff for myself from there in a small DMZ (ie: Miniflux RSS readers, Plex through Reverse proxy etc).
But I used a linode for my lemmy/kbin stuff. Reason being is that the code is fairly new and there may be exploits bugs and
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I dont want to deal with my ISP made an instance is exploited and becomes some type of C2 box or spews out spam. Kbin specifically already has PRs to fix XSS and Sql injection stuff, the former of which is usually avoidable if you just follow some pretty basic principles. So its a concern.
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Linode has better bandwidth than my non-symmetrical ISP uplink and is on its own quota.
It sounds like linode is the way to go then and their prices seem reasonable. The funny thing is I’ve heard of linode before because Computer Clan uses it as a sponsor, but ever since I started using sponsor block I haven’t really heard about it. I didn’t actually know what they did.
I’ve run linodes for years. My blog runs on them. I still host a variety of other services on them. They are good for everything from gaming servers to a blog etc.
They did get bought out by akamai a while back. And have raised their prices but they are still solid.
Nanodes are awesome deals frankly.
Is the 2GB the one you use for your Lemmy server? I’m getting ready to purchase one to see if I can figure it out.
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