Never self-hosted Lemmy, but have self-hosted other things in the past.
While you don’t necessarily need to code, you need a fair amount of code-adjacent skills. If you ever want to get into self-hosting, you should have a look into (at least):
the linux command line
ssh
how ports work
VPS providers
DNS registrars
nginx
docker (while you don’t need it to host things, it makes your life 10x easier)
docker (while you don’t need it to host things, it makes your life 10x easier)
…until you have a single extra space character hiding 20 lines into your compose file and the whole thing falls over the next time you try to bring the containers up.
I laughed but I dunno about you guys but I don’t publicly self host anything. If you can’t auth via ssh or VPN then you’re not accessing a damn thing from my home network. I’ve got multiple routers that I could set up some isolation with but it’s just too close to home.
Me having everything open: Come here mother***s I am waiting for all of you.
VPNs? Cloudfare? Cloudfare Tunnels? Tailscale? What’s all that? Here we are fighters not pus***s.
(Just kidding about the previos comments haha, well I have it open but it’s not on my home network… so slightly less problematic and tbh I am planning on closing some stuff, plus all is behind logins, and tbh I kind of like to be able to access to it from anywhere/any computer without having to use any special connection)
A tasker script automatically connects my phone to the Wireguard tunnel as soon as I disconnect from my home WiFi too, so I always have access to my services. It’s seamless, if I’m streaming music from Airsonic to my phone, and jump on my bike and take off, I don’t even skip a beat on playback.
I dont Think people properly understand they can be on any server. And join multiple communities. And it all Show up in their Feed. They don’t Need to worry about “which community has the Most Users”
Out of curiosity what has the disk usage growth looked like so far for your lemmy instance? I occasionally selfhost but I’m not a hardcore datahorder or anything so the replication of data from instances you subscribe to has me on the fence.
Lady i checked, it was about 21g used from a 1tb ZFS pool.
My instance isn’t minuscule though. Few months old and only 20 users.
I’m curious about longer term growth though. No idea how long 1tb will last, but I have more of need be.
Damn that setup is no joke. 21GB in a few months initially sounded like a lot to me… but I decided to math it out.
Lets say the 20gb was across 1,2 or 3 months…
Time till 1tb would fill up.
+------+-----------+----------+----------+
| | 3 months | 2 months | 1 month |
| 1 TB | ~12 years | ~8 years | ~4 years |
+------+-----------+----------+----------+
That data usage is looking pretty reasonable… Even 20gb per month is something that wouldn’t be too hard to keep up with and I’m sure eventually there’ll be a way to clean up old posts that no one on your instance saved or commented on if you are trying to save space. I’d start to worry if disk usage was hitting closer to 40gb a month.
i wish there was a way to show the growth over time, because obviously some is taken up by the OS, then all the initial setup of lemmy. I’ll keep an eye on it as it grows.
Grafana + something like influxdb+telegraf would do the trick. It sounds like you don’t have metric gathering like that on your instance? If that’s the case I’m surprised you don’t when you’re running with a full server rack haha.
It disregards the benefits of a distributed platform. Imagine if the admins went rouge, or the server data was irreversibly lost, suddenly all that content would be gone or under the authoritarian rule of the admins. Bit dramatic but you get the point.
If the majority of content is on there, we’ve quite literally taken a decentralised system and centralised it lol
Communities are inherently tied to the instance on which they are created and cannot be moved. If the instance is overloaded then that community will not federate properly. If the instance goes down nobody can post to the community. If the instance goes away that community goes away (except for the “cache” that other instances have).
Yes. Because there’s no centralised list of communities, searching is extremely difficult.
Or if not, very time consuming.
Following every iteration of every node.
I registered/setup https://selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it to any of the current mods. They passed because their idea of “we have a lemmy community already” is pointing to lemmy.ml
In terms of an optimal load spread, it’s best if the lemmiverse is split into multiple equally sized instances. If you use an instance just for yourself, it doesn’t actually decrease the load on the main servers in any way. The only thing you get is a guarantee that your instance won’t suddenly go down.
My instance will be for me only, I will be the only person on it and it will be closed for registrations. I won’t be responsible for anyone else’s data on my instance, nothing for me to be concerned about.
I’m not really sure about that. I’m not saying it as an expert or anything, but that’s a discussion I saw around here the other day.
Basically, once you federate and copy the content to your instance, it is in your server and you are responsible for it.
I’ll agree with a few things, tho:
It barely happens today, on centralized platforms. They’re hardly obliged to remove content because some judge says so (it does happen, tho, at least in my country)
I’d imagine it would be a bit of a grey area legally, right now. We would need legislation regarding the fediverse. Imagine someone posts child porn in an instance yours is federated to. Your instance copies the content. You notice and defederated the whole instance, but don’t remove the content. The dude is banned by his home instance and his post is removed. But his copy still exists in yours, since you defederated before his ban and content removal.
Just saying that selfhosting brings a lot of things that need to come to your attention.
Does Lemmy automatically grab all content from all federated servers, or does it only grab the content from communities you (and any other users on the instance) are subscribed to/are actively being visited?
I’m not so sure it does copy all content in the background.
Yeah, it’s only communities that people on your instance search for/subscribe to afaik. So if you’re the only one on your instance then you have control over that.
Further to that it’s only the post objects (and comments, etc.) that is replicated all pics and videos are just URLs. even when you upload a picture with the post, that’s just uploaded to the instance and the link to it is the link of the post, even on other instances the images are fetched from the original source from the client side. I do believe each instance does local thumbnaling.
What kind of “control” do you mean? Your posts/comments get replicated across all the other instances. You can’t really “guarantee” a delete, since the other instances might just ignore your request for delete.
By control, I mean I can back up my data and ensure my comments, subscribed communities, messages, etc are all available to me no matter what, I don’t have to rely on some external third-party managing it for me.
If you use an instance just for yourself, it doesn’t actually decrease the load on the main servers in any way.
That’s not completely true. Yeah, it still loads another server a bit, but the server-to-server federation traffic is much more lightweight than the client-to-server traffic that would be involved with you having an account on that server and accessing it that way.
But yeah, multiple, equally-sized communities on different instances is the ideal situation. The only sticky part right now is FOMO because you’d have to constantly watch for new SelfHosted communities and join them. Hopefully some frontend tools come along soon to make joining/managing multiple communities like that more streamlined.
Yes, ideally you‘d want to have a few large communties on each instance and not all topics with a single userbase on one. This not only decreases the load but also prevents scenarios in which a single admin starts to capsule their instance with a large userbase away from the federation.
Yeah… it is kinda hypocritical for this community to be based on .world, haha. There are plenty of people here running instances, who wants to volunteer as tribute and to sign up to be on call?
I’ve got business fiber, redundant networking, power, storage, and servers! With a bunch of compute sitting offline atm. Would be willing to give it a shot 🤔
Well, it’s self-hosting, right. We each host our own server with our own self-hosting community. Alone. No other posters, commenters, or voters. Just each of us in isolation talking to ourselves about our hosting setup.
This is a dumb meme, there’s no such thing as self-hosting a community. A community only becomes valuable when you share it beyond the hoster, at which point it stops being self-hosted for most community-members. I believe Ruud did actually create this community, which means it is properly self-hosted as much as a successful community can be.
Considering how overloaded lemmy.world is right now, a pi in someone’s basement would be better, and besides, centralization is bad. Federation is what prevents lemmy from becoming the next Twitter.
Yeah, the format is that she repeats the second panel on the fourth panel, with more question marks and concern. This version is almost like explaining the joke here.
Actually an instance dedicated to self hosted stuff would be great. We could have communities specifically for things like home lab, media hosting (Plex, Jellyfin, Emby), unRAID, TrueNAS, shit posting, hardware discussions, general conversations, etc.
This would reduce the strain on lemmy.world and give us all a dedicated home for more niche topics without posts getting buried
Well those instances are general ones. I am specifically talking about an instance dedicated to self hosting with communities dedicated to topics around self hosting
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
I want to self-host but don’t know how to code etc so not sure where to even start
Never self-hosted Lemmy, but have self-hosted other things in the past. While you don’t necessarily need to code, you need a fair amount of code-adjacent skills. If you ever want to get into self-hosting, you should have a look into (at least):
…until you have a single extra space character hiding 20 lines into your
composefile and the whole thing falls over the next time you try to bring the containers up.Lint your code and configs every time!
VScode with “format on save” enabled. Literally never had an issue.
It’s the editor that finally made me move away from vim
I’ve been using vscode since it was released and I never knew that was an option. Thank you!
You’re welcome!
I laughed but I dunno about you guys but I don’t publicly self host anything. If you can’t auth via ssh or VPN then you’re not accessing a damn thing from my home network. I’ve got multiple routers that I could set up some isolation with but it’s just too close to home.
Me having everything open: Come here mother***s I am waiting for all of you.
VPNs? Cloudfare? Cloudfare Tunnels? Tailscale? What’s all that? Here we are fighters not pus***s.
(Just kidding about the previos comments haha, well I have it open but it’s not on my home network… so slightly less problematic and tbh I am planning on closing some stuff, plus all is behind logins, and tbh I kind of like to be able to access to it from anywhere/any computer without having to use any special connection)
Same here.
A tasker script automatically connects my phone to the Wireguard tunnel as soon as I disconnect from my home WiFi too, so I always have access to my services. It’s seamless, if I’m streaming music from Airsonic to my phone, and jump on my bike and take off, I don’t even skip a beat on playback.
Ah the magic of buffers.
Inside the home even.
The connection is coming from INSIDE THE
houseINSTANCE!Can’t get hacked if all your services are down because you can’t get those cocksuckingmothershitbitchingassbastard routing tables right 🤯
I’m hosting one right now. Lemmyunchained.net
But in will have to Limit Users at some point.
I dont Think people properly understand they can be on any server. And join multiple communities. And it all Show up in their Feed. They don’t Need to worry about “which community has the Most Users”
Out of curiosity what has the disk usage growth looked like so far for your lemmy instance? I occasionally selfhost but I’m not a hardcore datahorder or anything so the replication of data from instances you subscribe to has me on the fence.
Lady i checked, it was about 21g used from a 1tb ZFS pool.
My instance isn’t minuscule though. Few months old and only 20 users. I’m curious about longer term growth though. No idea how long 1tb will last, but I have more of need be.
(This is my little lab)
Damn that setup is no joke. 21GB in a few months initially sounded like a lot to me… but I decided to math it out. Lets say the 20gb was across 1,2 or 3 months…
That data usage is looking pretty reasonable… Even 20gb per month is something that wouldn’t be too hard to keep up with and I’m sure eventually there’ll be a way to clean up old posts that no one on your instance saved or commented on if you are trying to save space. I’d start to worry if disk usage was hitting closer to 40gb a month.
i wish there was a way to show the growth over time, because obviously some is taken up by the OS, then all the initial setup of lemmy. I’ll keep an eye on it as it grows.
Grafana + something like influxdb+telegraf would do the trick. It sounds like you don’t have metric gathering like that on your instance? If that’s the case I’m surprised you don’t when you’re running with a full server rack haha.
I always just use the proxmox data. I’ll check out grafana.
I’ve seen something like 8 comments pointing people towards their own servers.
Which essentially guarantees a level of community fragmentation as to prevent community growth, cohesive, or general activity does it not?
Ideally each community “group” would have their own Lemmy instance.
Yes they can be on any instance, but I’m starting to get worried about the number of communities that are on Lemmy.world
Why is that worrying?
It disregards the benefits of a distributed platform. Imagine if the admins went rouge, or the server data was irreversibly lost, suddenly all that content would be gone or under the authoritarian rule of the admins. Bit dramatic but you get the point.
If the majority of content is on there, we’ve quite literally taken a decentralised system and centralised it lol
Communities are inherently tied to the instance on which they are created and cannot be moved. If the instance is overloaded then that community will not federate properly. If the instance goes down nobody can post to the community. If the instance goes away that community goes away (except for the “cache” that other instances have).
Can you move a community once it’s created?
Nope, but that would be an awesome new feature!
In practice right now it can be a bit schetchy tbh. Finding and subscribing to them is flakey and searching can be a bit hit and miss too.
When it does all work both smoothly and seemlessly then we’ll be golden.
Yes. Because there’s no centralised list of communities, searching is extremely difficult. Or if not, very time consuming. Following every iteration of every node.
I’m not sure how that can be overcome.
lemmyverse.net
Oh my god, I laughed so loudly that I had to explain this comic to my wife. She thought I’m dying already.
Also blame the reddit mods for it.
I registered/setup https://selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it to any of the current mods. They passed because their idea of “we have a lemmy community already” is pointing to lemmy.ml
There is always: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting 100% certified self-hosted from free-ranging servers 😅
In terms of an optimal load spread, it’s best if the lemmiverse is split into multiple equally sized instances. If you use an instance just for yourself, it doesn’t actually decrease the load on the main servers in any way. The only thing you get is a guarantee that your instance won’t suddenly go down.
Suddenly going down seems to be a constant in my self hosted services though…
ayo gurl lemme go down on your stack
I wanna self-host my own instance so I have more control over my data.
You also should be concerned about other people’s data on your instance tho
My instance will be for me only, I will be the only person on it and it will be closed for registrations. I won’t be responsible for anyone else’s data on my instance, nothing for me to be concerned about.
I’m not really sure about that. I’m not saying it as an expert or anything, but that’s a discussion I saw around here the other day.
Basically, once you federate and copy the content to your instance, it is in your server and you are responsible for it.
I’ll agree with a few things, tho:
It barely happens today, on centralized platforms. They’re hardly obliged to remove content because some judge says so (it does happen, tho, at least in my country)
I’d imagine it would be a bit of a grey area legally, right now. We would need legislation regarding the fediverse. Imagine someone posts child porn in an instance yours is federated to. Your instance copies the content. You notice and defederated the whole instance, but don’t remove the content. The dude is banned by his home instance and his post is removed. But his copy still exists in yours, since you defederated before his ban and content removal.
Just saying that selfhosting brings a lot of things that need to come to your attention.
Does Lemmy automatically grab all content from all federated servers, or does it only grab the content from communities you (and any other users on the instance) are subscribed to/are actively being visited?
I’m not so sure it does copy all content in the background.
Yeah, it’s only communities that people on your instance search for/subscribe to afaik. So if you’re the only one on your instance then you have control over that.
Further to that it’s only the post objects (and comments, etc.) that is replicated all pics and videos are just URLs. even when you upload a picture with the post, that’s just uploaded to the instance and the link to it is the link of the post, even on other instances the images are fetched from the original source from the client side. I do believe each instance does local thumbnaling.
What kind of “control” do you mean? Your posts/comments get replicated across all the other instances. You can’t really “guarantee” a delete, since the other instances might just ignore your request for delete.
By control, I mean I can back up my data and ensure my comments, subscribed communities, messages, etc are all available to me no matter what, I don’t have to rely on some external third-party managing it for me.
That’s not completely true. Yeah, it still loads another server a bit, but the server-to-server federation traffic is much more lightweight than the client-to-server traffic that would be involved with you having an account on that server and accessing it that way.
But yeah, multiple, equally-sized communities on different instances is the ideal situation. The only sticky part right now is FOMO because you’d have to constantly watch for new SelfHosted communities and join them. Hopefully some frontend tools come along soon to make joining/managing multiple communities like that more streamlined.
Yes, ideally you‘d want to have a few large communties on each instance and not all topics with a single userbase on one. This not only decreases the load but also prevents scenarios in which a single admin starts to capsule their instance with a large userbase away from the federation.
Yes, but we’re currently evolving into a situation where everything is centralized around Lemmy.world
Also the assurance that your home instance won’t be suddenly federated from one of the major ones
As long as you don’t let your instance become bot/nazi/tanky swarm, you are green…
Yeah… it is kinda hypocritical for this community to be based on .world, haha. There are plenty of people here running instances, who wants to volunteer as tribute and to sign up to be on call?
I’ve got business fiber, redundant networking, power, storage, and servers! With a bunch of compute sitting offline atm. Would be willing to give it a shot 🤔
Needs monitoring though.
Well, it’s self-hosting, right. We each host our own server with our own self-hosting community. Alone. No other posters, commenters, or voters. Just each of us in isolation talking to ourselves about our hosting setup.
This is a dumb meme, there’s no such thing as self-hosting a community. A community only becomes valuable when you share it beyond the hoster, at which point it stops being self-hosted for most community-members. I believe Ruud did actually create this community, which means it is properly self-hosted as much as a successful community can be.
It is, but it’s also on a server that’s crippled by load. Each community having an instance makes sense as far as load goes.
Well, did you self host this meme?
This meme template NEVER gets old, lmao… Anakin’s face always gets me
Considering how overloaded lemmy.world is right now, a pi in someone’s basement would be better, and besides, centralization is bad. Federation is what prevents lemmy from becoming the next Twitter.
I want to move to a selfhosted instance once I can migrate my account. Anyone knows if this feature will be implemented ?
I think it’s far down on their list of things to do unfortunately.
Literally just left lemmy.world because of how brutally slow it’s been
Ok, back to meme school for you
This is my favorite Star Trek episode, too. Ruined.
https://picard.ytmnd.com/
mic drop
I feel like that page needs to allow scrolling and just tile that image forever in all directions.
This is the theme song for The Greatest Generation Podcast.
Lmao you beat me to pointing that out, he totally butchered the template
Yeah, the format is that she repeats the second panel on the fourth panel, with more question marks and concern. This version is almost like explaining the joke here.
Is there a community for gently abused memes that I can post this to?
LHBDM (Lemmy’s Home for Battered or Disheveled Memes)
reddit/r/funny
He said gently bro
If you self host a community how would anyone find it?
post it in New Communities and also it should show in Lemmy Explorer
Actually an instance dedicated to self hosted stuff would be great. We could have communities specifically for things like home lab, media hosting (Plex, Jellyfin, Emby), unRAID, TrueNAS, shit posting, hardware discussions, general conversations, etc.
This would reduce the strain on lemmy.world and give us all a dedicated home for more niche topics without posts getting buried
Something like selfhost.edu/c/jellyfin or self.host is a great name too, if I was in the position to do it I would haha
Unfortunately, you can’t get .edu domains without being a school
But aren’t there already instances that are focused on these topics, like lemmy.ml or reddthat.com?
Well those instances are general ones. I am specifically talking about an instance dedicated to self hosting with communities dedicated to topics around self hosting
That was the idea behind borg.chat but I was a bit late to the party :)
Isn’t selfhosted started by the same dude that started lemmy.world? Meaning it really is selfhosted? 🤔
Checkmate!
holy hell
It’s an older crossover, but it checks out
pipi
Task failed successfully
Stop pointing shit out and grab your bean fork, we’re rioting!
And shitting (are we still shitting?)
We’re on Lemmy aren’t we?
Not shitting (for 3 days)
Ya need some miralax.