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.

Yea but if you host with a major cloud server provider you're basically having 100% uptime because they very very rarely go down and so the only issues would be stuff you'd have to deal with.

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.

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.

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

For personal use, even a Raspberry Pi is sufficient.

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

I’ve wondered the same. I know I’m not the only one with the 1.8 TB Reddit data dump. It would be cool to import all that into a Lemmy instance.

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.

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.

As someone that has spent the better part of the week mucking with it.... the kbin build docs have multiple gaps in the documentation and are functionally broken unless you have some better understanding of the setup. I WAS able to get the system built, but could never get it online. Best i got was 500 errors where the UI was up but there was a break somewhere in Redis, Postgres, Nginx etc. All the logs were clean though. This was with the docker method and build from source method on both Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian 11 (which are what he specifically referenced)

Lemmy was much easier to setup using the ansible method. I have an instance online. Though im still working out the federation thing and some other kinks. I figured it would just reach out to Activity pub and federate with everyone but now it seems I have to build a static list...If if search for an instance i know exists I get a

404: couldnt_find_community

So there are some gaps but it seems much more mature. For example you cant mark your instance private AND have federation enabled. If you do that and restart the instance will fail to come up, but theres no warning or error in the UI.

I like the kbin dev better as people. But the lemmy code is definately more polished, even if the devs are turd sammiches.

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.

Sure.

I run my own instance at a cloud provider, and thus have monthly expenses I wouldn't normally incur, if I were using a public instance.

I'm using Linode, and their prices are publicly available.

https://www.linode.com/pricing/

For Mastodon, I'm using the Linode 4 GB while the Lemmy server runs on the Linode 2 GB option. Both are under the Shared CPU pricing -- not dedicated.

If every solo user spun up an instance just for themselves there wouldn’t be a benefit over all those users just signing up directly to an existing instance.

Not quite true... There's a ton of sql queries that go on to show you the correct content for your user. Showing the correct subscriptions, applying the correct "bans" etc... Further sessions management of the user logging in itself... Direct messages, inbox management... etc...

Just the raw content being sent to sync is just minimal text data that's effectively broadcasted. The stress of that is virtually nothing in comparison.

The break even is that a ton of data might sync that you never look at... but it's a broadcast of sorts. So that's a bit of a non issue.

Wouldn't it still be a bit less taxing even with only one user? If I'm not mistaken then your instance only initially requests a community/post/comment from another instance when you specifically search for it. After that your server gets updates through activities pushed by the other instance. So if you refresh a post multiple times those requests only go to your instance. It somewhat acts like a cache, while the other instance can push activities at it's own pace instead of being hammered with requests. Of course multiple users per instance would still be better.

I almost think this is a blessing because you don't get so overwhelmed with stuff you don't care about and only see what you're looking for. But yes the UI for it is not very good yet.

Once I subbed to a few things now it seems my all feed gets content from servers and communities I'm not subscribed too. Just took a bit. Mostly from smaller foreign ones right now tho.

Deleted, I figured out you were not conplaining, but responding to another comment

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

As far as I can tell yes. Once the federation catches up the backlog, comments and posts seem to be near instantaneous.

They do seem to. I'm on my own instance. Sometimes it seems a bit funky though it usually seems to be when I've just subscribed.

I’m using a t2.micro instance which I think is best for a small instance like mine, but I think there are other options you can look into with different RAM and CPU.

I will try that, thank you.

I think it would be better if @marsta@beehaw.org would post the errors so the solution to his problems is documented in case someone else has a similar problem.

This way we could google problems and just add lemmy instead of reddit to find a proper solution.

Depends, what do you mean with "no background in any of this"? I started yesterday and set up the instance within 3h, starting around 1h after I saw the name "Lemmy" the first time. I still have to iron out some issues.

But I do have a strong background with docker, Linux administration, networking, and generally DevOps, and I do have a virtual root server up and running for some time.

If you have no background in docker and Linux (administration), I would say you'd do better focusing on smaller things, running some servers locally in docker and so on. There should be lots of opportunities to have a quick success to build up on.

If you have that background already and only have no background in the topics of Fediverse and Lemmy, https://join-lemmy.org/... provides some relatively easy to follow instructions.

The costs are basically the costs of an always on Linux server, preferably with a fixed IP address. I'm not sure what you would pay wherever you live, I pay ~15€/month for 8GB, 4 cores, virtual root server with my own domain name.

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.

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.

If I create a private community for all my family members it remains private while I selfhost. If I create it on someone else's server it ain't that private because the admin could be eavesdropping.