First post from my new, self-hosted, personal instance. Feels good!

  • reflex_aliens@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Nice work dad. How difficult was it? I’ve been thinking about going down that road but concerned about the overhead.

    • Osayidan@social.vmdk.ca
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      1 year ago

      If you host the instance just for your own account to be under your control there’s hardly any overhead. I’m running it in docker in a debian 12 VM with 1 GB ram, 1 virtual CPU and 50GB virtual disk. Haven’t had any issues.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        This is valuable info. Is there a Docker image that’s preconfigured for it or did you install on a LAMP image or other third way?

        • dan@upvote.au
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          1 year ago

          There’s a few Docker images, since it needs a database and some other services, and the best practice with Docker is one container per service. The documentation is here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

          I removed the Nginx server from the docker-compose.yml though. I already had an Nginx server running on the same server, so I just added the config to the existing server instead.

          • maxgry@lemmy.iqecke.de
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            1 year ago

            I also installed my private server and setting everything up was quite easy :) I left nginx as is and just put everything behind my Caddy as reverse proxy

            • dan@upvote.au
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              1 year ago

              I’ve been meaning to try Caddy and Traefik. I’ve been using Nginx for so long and don’t really have a reason to switch though.

              For Lemmy, I didn’t see a major advantage of running a reverse proxy behind another reverse proxy which is why I’m not running Lemmy’s Nginx container.

        • Osayidan@social.vmdk.ca
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          1 year ago

          I went with docker but back then their documentation for it was trash and hardly worked. Had to trial and error it until it was functional. Hopefully they fixed that by now.

    • orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
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      1 year ago

      If you do end up going for it, Lemmy Easy Deploy is the tool I used and it’s awesome. I had no success with any other guide.

      It was pretty easy with that tool. The overhead isn’t too bad but I recommend not going below 2GB of memory. I rode along on 1GB for a little while to see how things went, and it topped out quite a bit. I pay a little extra for automatic backups too which is worth the peace of mind. It’s about ~$18/month with Digital Ocean.

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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      1 year ago

      Well, I couldn’t figure out Docker because I’m a newb, so I decided to give the app in Yunohost a try. I was reluctant at first, because when I last checked the available version of Lemmy was kind of old and image uploads were broken. However, when I checked today, the version was 0.18.2 and the disclaimer about the broken feature was gone. So, I gave it a try and it just worked. I do still have to test image uploads.

      We’ll see about overhead. I’ve got it running on a VM to which I’ve allocated 500GB. The VM is on an older i5 desktop with 16GB of RAM. I’ve already been running a Pixelfed instance for a couple of weeks and so far so good.

  • infamousbelgian@waste-of.space
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    1 year ago

    Welcome to the club! I used the same easy deploy setup as you! Makes life really easy eh :)

    Furthermore, to populate All, I have this one running: https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot

    If you do this, you will need some extra space because the database will grow, but I think it solves one of the (largest) downsides of running your own instance, namely discovering other communities.

      • infamousbelgian@waste-of.space
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        1 year ago

        When you decide to set it up, you need to create a user on your instance and fill in those details in the command line to run the thing. Also make sure to change the instance name to your name, otherwise it will not work.

        Other useful commands:

        docker rm --force lemmy-subscriber-bot To actually destroy the docker container if you want to start over

        docker logs lemmy-subscriber-bot To see if the thing is running and doing things.

        • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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          1 year ago

          From the readme:

          As of the writing of this tool, and size of the fediverse (Jul 2023), using this tool, may result in disk space usage of around 2GiB/day, according to my own metrics.

          Seems kind of steep. I only have 500GB allocated to my server. I feel like there’s got to be a better way.

          • infamousbelgian@waste-of.space
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            1 year ago

            I have the feeling that this is extremely exaggerated. I only have 40 Gb in total and still have 23 gb free. I don’t run the tool constantly, but run it every once in a while to make sure that my All has interesting communities. If it would be 2 gb/day I would be loooooong over my 40…

        • code@lemmy.mayes.io
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          1 year ago

          The latest really improves things space wise and cleans up better. Single instance here for almost a month. About 50-60 subscription’s and am at 2gb db size

    • Billygoat@catata.fish
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      1 year ago

      Thank you for the info. I set my instance up yesterday as well and my goal today was to do this.

    • koper@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      Just so you know, this also creates more load on other instances, especially the larger ones.

  • AngryDemonoid@lemmy.lylapol.com
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    1 year ago

    Nice! Just me on my instance too. The only downside I’ve found so far is that I have to discover new communities in my own since there is no one else to populate “All”.

    Small price to pay to have control over my instance though.

    • fuser@quex.cc
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      1 year ago

      this is just a quick script I came up with, but it will show you newest communities and their descriptions. It refreshes daily. maybe it will be helpful for discovering niche communities : https://lemmyfind.quex.cc/

    • Darkbug@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m really thinking about spinning up my own instant. I joined lemmy.one a while ago and it dark at the moment. After reddit I’m not digging the lack of control… Do you have any recommendations for running your own instant?

    • Nunchuk@lemmy.bigsecretwebsite.net
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      1 year ago

      Yeah it was a bit annoying at first, but I just created a “all” user that just subbed to everything (well not everything, shout-out to all the communities that speak another language). I don’t recall exact links but if you just search for “all bot Lemmy” there are some stuff people have made which will just auto join basically all communities in an instance

  • Skimmer@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    Welcome!

    How hard was it to set up? I’ve been considering making my own personal instance for a while now but haven’t fully properly looked into it

  • rabidpug@3t.au
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    1 year ago

    Been on my own instance all month and it’s been smooth sailing for me!

  • HousePanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com
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    1 year ago

    Good on you for standing up your own instance. It’s certainly nothing to shake a stick at and you’re coming in at the right time when Lemmy just got a big performance boost in v0.18.3 as well as an 80% reduction size in the PostgreSQL database. Good things are happening.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I still need to look into self-hosting Lemmy some time, but alas, it takes time lol

    I’m even more tempted now that lemmy.one, my main instance I was using, appears to be down with a database issue according to its API. Which of course means if they don’t have working backups, it may actually just be gone forever, along with my post history there.

    • Nato Boram@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Shame, I was considering using them since the idea of having an instance with no community creation to save on bandwidth was an interesting concept and I needed to get out of lemmy.world because of its stability issues