I am fairly new to Lemmy and was thinking of getting an account on one of the “big” servers to get the full experience, but then I figured I could do exactly the same thing as with my GoToSocial and other services: run my own instance.
I am wondering if this is an overkill or not. Any experience running your own small Lemmy instance? Are there better options that are compatible with Lemmy but lighter to run for this purpose?
And now running both Lemmy and PieFed side by side (OP, posting from my PieFed account).
I think admin wise I am going to stick with PieFed. Definitely liking it more!
I run dullsters.net which is sort of a single user instance. Nobody else can make accounts it’s strictly for one community.
Running “my” own single user instance here.
Great! Love it! The whole idea.
For how long and how do resource usage and storage space used look by now?
Disk space 10gb, CPU/ram not noticeable on my server (lots of other services using more than Lemmy).
I think it’s been up about one year. One user but I subscribe to all communities I find remotely interesting.
Thanks for the reply. So what kind of magnitude are we talking on the RAM usage here? Some people here talked about not being able to fit it inside 2G total. So I assume it’s probably like hundreds of megs which is only really significant in such low memory configurations.
My server has 48gb ram and in top Lemmy doesn’t appear even in the 0.1% memory usage.
AS a ex single lemmy user, yes. I use PieFed instead. Background: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed
Yes join the dosins of us 🥧
*Baker’s dozens
I mean you jest, hence upvoting, but I also find it funny that more people use PieFed now than are on lemmy.ml (edit: to explain, that is by far the most talked about instance across the entire Threadiverse). On PieFed.social alone there are >1k active users.
Very compelling reason to switch to PieFed. But I’m very lazy and probably won’t get around to it for another year haha
would be nice if it’s possible to use mlmym with piefed… luckily it seems like boost and voyager now works tho
i am considering spinning up a piefed boi, which at the most, would end up with maybe 5 users.
we’ll see!
I run a single user PieFed instance for a month now. Compatible with Lemmy. Everything runs smooth so far.
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I was in the same boat, so I’ll leave you with this golden nugget you probably want to check out:
certbot
Even better: Caddy.
As simple and easy to run as nginx, and has built-in cert management.
Have run Lemmy and now Piefed, it’s nice to have things customized to your wants, but probably wouldn’t bother if it was setting up a host just for that.
As others have already said, piefed is much lighter than lemmy, and is what I’m running as well, my instance isn’t necessarily single-user, (anyone’s free to join), but there’s only one other user on my instance
yeeeeaaaahhhhh boiiiiii
And there they are!
Directly compatible with Lemmy, there’s Friendica (Facebook-like; also compatible with Twitter-like posts e.g. from Mastodon), Mbin (simplified/cleaner UI; also hybrid like Friendica), and PieFed (apparently more Reddit-like than Lemmy from what I read, in a technical sense).
Dunno which are better/worse to run, but I remember seeing hardware requirements on the docs of each of them.
Also it’s not uncommon to see single user instances from my experience. But if you feel it’s a waste of domain/resources, you could also create some dedicated community or something to give further use for it.
RSS’s a big for me and had been considering originally using Mastodon + RSS Parrot. But though I don’t like the UI of Friendica, its native tracker bot function sounds rather interesting. 👀
Thinking here, the site engine I’d pick for daily use would probably be Mbin. But as I hear it is a bit of a processing hog, running it and a Friendica instance on the same device would maybe be too much for the device, so maybe I should buy another Raspberry Pi or some other SBC for it.
Also on the images issue pointed by another user, maybe also see if Lemmy now has a solution for it, or if any of the alternatives do.
The solution is to not proxy images. Might even be the default by now. That’s a huge resource hog. No idea what pictrs is doing but it’s still taking up a whole lotta space just for my own images.
Tangencial comment, but as I’d presume your instance is running on a Linux server (usually sites are), maybe check with ncdu (if available) which folders are the biggest?
The trouble with pictrs is that it sorts pictures into seemingly random folders.
Another single-user Piefed guy weighing in. Do it.
Having to run a full-blown PostgreSQL instance just for a single user is a show-stopper for me.
PostgreSQL
fuckin gross!
PostgreSQL is a goated database. It’s rock solid.
No clue why you’d find it gross. I’ll take it over MySQL, OracleDB or MariaDB any day.
I don’t really worry too much about running multiple DBs; all the apps I am currently running are dockerized. As far as I can run everything I need for an app can run as a container, I am good. For apps like these, they run in their own network and only the main entry point is visible to the interwebs via private tunnel.
In my case it’s a matter of RAM (a few hundred megabytes available only).
It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Honestly I want to host a Lemmy instance and my own peertube instance.
Two things are stopping me. I don’t understand certain points of how things interact in the software or how to set it up properly to self host and be comfortable in it’s security. I barely understand docker and some other stuff. It sucks because I understood how to use DOS at an around 14 by reading the manual. I also don’t have the funding to do so in a way that I would feel comfortable at this point. I don’t fully trust co-mingling my home services with web services due to the security risks.
Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)
But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.
I will have to take another look. I’ve seen it before but didn’t see anything about Lemmy and such.
YuNoHost is a great alternative, but if you really want to learn, I would instead recommend really spending some time learning Docker; you don’t have to understand how to build your own images (although that is also very useful), but mostly what is going on at a high level, and then switch to Docker Compose. These days it is extremely easy to run very complex architectures with a single compose file.
You also don’t need to make it public for your tests, you can always start with local ip addresses and you own computer, or if you have a small computer that can run headless, then you can setup your experiments in there.
This is like the opposite of what you want to do for complex software - don’t add more abstraction, or you won’t know what to do when stuff goes wrong!
Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You’ll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that’s somehow needed for software M on python x.xx… Of course you’re then not going to learn about these things. It is not “bad”, though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it’s easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one’s weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times…
I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.
I did it for a while and it was a fun little technical project but once the pictrs image cache exhausted the amount of storage I got in the cloud host service’s free tier, I stopped because I didn’t feel like spending money on it
Thanks for all the feedback!
I’m going to take a look at PieFed, maybe run both in parallel for a few weeks and see which one fells better 😉.
Here is a potentially very helpful thread: https://slrpnk.net/post/29381524/18801279
