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.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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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.
I think for now it's so early it doesn't matter all that much. Just have fun! You can make multiple accounts so why not
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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?
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.
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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’m up to about 300MB of disk usage after a day of hosting my own. Curious to see how it grows.
haha better than the 12GB and rising of my single-user Mastodon instance. And this is with deleting my media cache every night.
Mastodon is aggressive with caching media. Akkoma is more lightweight
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.
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For personal use, even a Raspberry Pi is sufficient.
My raspberry pi 4 is using 810mb of RAM and 11gb of file system space.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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As far as I can tell yes. Once the federation catches up the backlog, comments and posts seem to be near instantaneous.
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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.
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.
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.
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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 :(
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.
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.yml did 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 their docker-compose.yml and it should work.
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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.
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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 :-)
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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.
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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/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?
- 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
Been trying to find out how; kinda funny googling it brings up reddit links on a protesting reddit sub.
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.
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