What are the storage implications of setting up your own instance? Are you syncing the contents of every sub or just the ones you and your friends subscribe to? I like the idea of doing it but will it be TB’s of content in a few months?
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Just the ones people subscribe to.
I have an instance with over 600 users that has been up 6 weeks, and the storage grows every day. Database is 22GB and image cache + uploads is 30GB. In theory the cache should be cleared after a certain time, but I'm not aware of a configuration setting for this in Lemmy.
For the database a fix is incoming for the next release that will decrease the size a lot. For image storage it is more complicated, but configuring Pict-rs to only accept images of a certain size and convert them to webp does help a bit.
You nailed it, it only pulls posts from communities that someone on your instance subbed to. It doesn't even pull retroactively; your instance only starts pulling posts created after the first subscriber on the instance subbed.
I'm more concerned regarding media, because just like Mastodon, the pics themselves are copied from other instances onto yours. I hope it will be enough to just find -mtime -delete once in a while
Also seeing the federation happening live at tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log is so satisfying. I think I like computers
It’s also interesting to see how many random webcrawlers are out there! When I was first setting up my instance I was spot checking some IPs and found all sorts of interesting security services.
I think I have the tech know-how to do it, but what worries me is that users could post illegal content, which my instance could then pull in. Since it’s on my storage, I would be legally responsible for that. So I’d have to constantly check, probably. How do others do this?
Thats what worries me as well. I‘m an aspiring self hoster. Got many services but still learning. Having to deal with authorities is not something I look forward to.
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I've just gotten my own instance of Lemmy running here and think I'm getting the hang of how to subscribe and link up to other instances. This is also a teaser to see if my first comment actually works!
I wish someday self-hosting anything (not just Lemmy) becomes as easy as installing an app. Self-hosting doesn't need to be a nerd thing.
The hard part is the network. Everything is different with different ISP. The DNS is another challenge, you need to buy your 'internet real estate' and have it work correctly if your IP change.
Security is another challenge but I think it's easier to notice unusual traffic from your basement server than from a mega-tech-bro-corporation. There's probably some easy software that could do that.
Unraid with some Community Apps and Docker turned on is pretty turn-key with a ton of room for superusers.
@mfat
https://yunohost.org/ is an attempt to fill that gap, but it's missing a key feature. Anything that wants to be broadly adopted will have to be appified these days.
@maor
It is cool, but lately there has been a bit too much hassle with it - my instance (latest versions mind you) is federating like shit.
There are often posts with wildly different upvote and comment counters, comments not loading at all even after days and so on.
I tried looking into it, both in issues on GH and Matrix room but no-one has time:/
It was a fun experience trying to get to all work. I did originally try on my raspberrypi but I ended up just giving up on that due to the issues you mentioned. But it's nice to have my own instance, and slowly populating the all feed with new subscriptions and well I owned the domain va11halla.bar I had to use it for my name.
"vanity purposes" lmao I love it
Well...
I have no idea what you are talking about /s
I'm running my own server on a linode. I've got it on the cheapest tier which is $5 a month. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do when the 25GB gets full, I'll have to find out the best way to delete old posts and pictures.
Keep the activity table on a tight leash.
Yeah, I've heard of people using cron jobs to automatically clean activity older than 3 days.
I'm not sure what can be done about image staking up a lot of space, I imagine that'll take up a ton of space after a while. Not sure how that could be cleaned up safely.
I believe there are ways to prune the images store but I haven't dug into that yet.
It's certainly been an adventure for me that's mostly spurred me to learn about how to user/admin docker. (I need a project to dig into to learn things.)
I'm enjoying worrying people with my vanity domain. My instance is essentially single user (me and a couple selected friends)
The more I see this community the more I think about starting a mastodon/Lemmy instance of my own. I used to have a home rack setup, but a 1U in an apartment isn’t ideal. I’ve cut down to just a old desktop with a pair of redundant 8TB drives now and might have to spin up a cheap vps somewhere.
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How useful it is to actually have a self-hosted lemmy instance if u are alone on it btw ?
Usefull as in fun? Or the fact you're the boss? Top dog?
We really need a CPanel/Softaculous installer like we have for wordpress etc. Would love to host, but atm there's so much backend config for JoeDev to deal with.
I would love to do this but I'm afraid of exposing my home IP to the world of spammer and what not. Did you selfhost on a cloud provider or did you do it from your home ? How crazy does the security need to be around Lemmy instance ? I really feel like it's a beacon of come hack me if you can!
One method that many people use to hide their IP address of their host is to use Cloudflare for DNS, that way you don't directly expose your IP address to the wider internet. A nice bonus to Clouldflare is that it's free too! Just get yourself a domain, get Cloudflare set up to provide DNS for it and you're golden.
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I’ve been trying to get lemmy broken up to microservices for my Raspberry Pi k3s cluster. I have postgres running but I’m well outside my comfort zone trying to learn how kubernetes works. If I stand up the other microservices (pictrs and lemmy) do I just need to use the same namespace? How do I tell it the server url/fqdn/ip for postgres? Does metallb do that for me?
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I wanna look into self-hosting my own Lemmy instance some time. Once I have more time to figure it out with my home network local server w/ public cloud VPS OpenVPN server setup (likely with Docker containers too) I'll take a look into it. You're right, it'll likely be fun and right up my alley too.
Is there a community for troubleshooting self-hosted lemmy instances? Mine has issues showing search results and adding other instances. Unfortunately there's not a lot I can find with my Google-fu.
Will set up one later on too, glad to hear it was a joy to tinker with, looking forwards to it!
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