Should I host my own instance if I don't intend to run a community?
Should I host my own instance if I don't intend to run a community?
Is there any benefit to host my own instance?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
Regular users can block communities and instances both.
I wonder if it's possible to migrate those Reddit datasets and import them into our own Lemmy instance
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
how much does your mastadon instance cost per month? what do you expect for lemmy?
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.
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 already have a nomad cluster in my homelab, running Lemmy is a no brainer.
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!
It's only less taxing if it's multiple ppl on an instance.
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.
Eg 5 users on instance b trying to access instance a Is better then 5 users each with their own instance trying to access instance a.
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 would doubt this. Your server is essentially another client
I feel that speed is the biggest benefit. I was on kbin.social and in the beginning everything was fine, but after a while when they got more and more users it was terrible. Every second click led me to cloudflare sometimes even with the capcha.
On my own instance now since yesterday everything is so fast! I chose lemmy because it's written in Rust and I have the feeling that it will be more resourceful and with less bugs than /kbin because of that ^^
Yeah, I'm running on an instance of just me and my wife, biggest downside is needing to subscribe to communities before we get content, but its sooo much faster.
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.
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...
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 like running my own too, and agree it’s a bit of a chore to get content.
I feel the biggest hurdle is finding communities. I wish the instance would automatically index communities from federated instances. I don’t mean track posts/comments, just keep a record of the communities existence.
Looking them up elsewhere, then searching locally, waiting for it to work, then subscribing is a bit of work and I’ve only bothered with about 10 so far.
In my navigation of the fediverse the last few days I've noticed a few people running instances of mastodon and lemmy with just themselves or 1 or 2 other people etc.
If you into tinkering and selfhosting, why not :D Means you're in full control of what other instances you federate with/can see etc.
Running my own instance using AWS's free tier for now, though I think I'll keep it after. It makes scaling soo easy and simple if my instance ever takes off. Which I don't know if it ever will lol. The reason why I even created one is to actually use my domain name for something rather than keep paying for a domain that I'll never use for anything.
Which of the free AWS ones did you choose. I just had a look and there are lots of different ones which is best for lemmy?
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 host my own instance, but I like selfhosting as a hobby. I really love having all my account/login stuff on my own hardware and my own backups. If I break something, its just my own stuff that broken, no harm done to any other users. I don't really plan on hosting any of my own communities, just participating in others. I'm an avid seflhoster, and my setup is pretty exotic compared to the vast majority of hosters, but I got the whole thing working perfectly over a day. Much better than when I tried to get mastodon working. More power to more fediverse stuff though.
I was discussing this with other lemmings on matrix and it seems there is not much help if you dont have a community to build on your own instance. Now if you do host for yourself then you can federate with other instances to subscribe and pull from their communities which does reduce the total load on those services but that is about it.
Communities are going to Win/Loose based on personalities and critical mass, and the people hosting those communities will just have to increase their hosting needs.
Now if you do host for yourself then you can federate with other instances to subscribe and pull from their communities which does reduce the total load on those services but that is about it.
That is the main thing I'm doing, personally.
Communities are going to Win/Loose based on personalities and critical mass, and the people hosting those communities will just have to increase their hosting needs.
Speaking of hosting, I got to thinking what might happen when a community needs to move to another server. I wonder if some day we'll see a solution similar to Mastodon's where users can move their accounts and/or entire communities between Lemmy instances.
It does give you authentication security in that, you should only have an issue if your instance is down. If the instance your account is tied to goes up and down then your ability to access your subscriptions and participate are also up and down.
I wish the identity stuff and authentication was separated from instances, but unfortunately it isn't.
Appreciate if you guys shared some guides on setting it up. I’m not new to selfhosting but tried setting it up and failed with strange errors all day long :(
Not sure if you got it sorted or not, but if you were following the docker-compose method documented by the devs, there were a couple hurdles I ran into. The one that may be relevant here is that at some point their
docker-compose.ymldid not expose the Lemmy backend to the Internet, and so all federation was failing. That said, I checked just now and they seem to have fixed that issue upstream. So you should be able to re-pull theirdocker-compose.ymland it should work.I will try that, thank you.
I would suggest joining us on the Lemmy matrix space, particularly the "Lemmy Instance Admin" channel. It's much easier to help in semi-real time.
No worries, this is a fairly complex piece of software. If you really want to though, try copy pasting your errors into chatgpt if you can. While not perfect, it usually can give you an idea of what steps are going wrong. Some of us can help you too, but it's no pressure. Being a part of the community is more than just the machines, it's the friends we made along the way.
I think it would be better if @[email protected] 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.
I started my own instance and do currently not intend to open it for others (besides, maybe, close friends and family).
My intention are
- to learn more about the concepts
- evaluate how reliable the replication of comments and posts works
- maybe create my own pseudo-community just for myself, as kind of a simplified blog
Reading other posts in this sub, I saw it is still seen as offloading the main servers, as the replication of the data is a low load compared to serving the UI. Maybe one of these motivations apply to you, too? Or you find another one? At the end of the day, host your own instance if you want to :-)
Is there a tutorial or something out there? I've got no background in any of this but would like to maybe give it a go myself at some point. Would you be willing to say how much it costs as well?
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/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html 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.
Everything is under your control, you'll never be collateral damage. Cooler username?
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/[email protected] on my instance made by a user from lemmy.ml?
Would a user that reads /c/[email protected] on lemmy.ml see my comments, if I only federate with lemmy.world?
- only the ones that host communities you subscribe to, in fact you can specifically whitelist certain instances
- yes, comments and posts made from other instances are forwarded on to subscribers
- yes, for the same reason
Yes, big instances are not ready to handle the traffic and could go down - see lemmy.ml
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'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.
Been trying to find out how; kinda funny googling it brings up reddit links on a protesting reddit sub.
Besides all the good reasons already given you can also get a hostname that fits you the best :)
Honestly this was one of the main reasons for me, I like using my domain as my key identity in a sense. Same for Gotosocial and Matrix.
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.
I run my own instance because I have the resources, I intend to create communities and it is much more private this way.
What are the privacy advantages of self hosting lemmy? as in what kind of data are we otherwise sharing when we use someone else's instance?
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.
Same! Community building is fun, although in my case slow…
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 in the process of upgrading my Plex server, once that's done I plan hosting my own Lemmy instance on the old server to test it out for personal use.
You absolutely don't need to be hosting any communities and can use it just for your own control over your access to the fediverse.
Okay that is pretty tempting, now I am gonna have to look into hosting my own at some point lol
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.
For me the benefit is uniformity (not sure if thats a word) i can have a matrix account, a mastodon account, a lemmy account, all sorts of fediverse accounts all under my own domain.
This comes next to the already mentioned benefits ofcourse :)