this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] StrangeWorrier 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] muddybulldog 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] IowaMan 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] CaptainApathetic 1 points 1 year ago

Yea but if you host with a major cloud server provider you're basically having 100% uptime because they very very rarely go down and so the only issues would be stuff you'd have to deal with.

[–] Kyoyeou 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] pzza 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If data is migrated from server to server, as the community grows in size, the data to be maintained on each server also grows in size? Also i've seen some servers allow the creation of new users/communities, but some don't... whats the point of that if the data is just replicated anyway?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes that's right, an instance is constantly accumulating data over time, however instances that aren't the origin instance have the option of going back and deleting old posts (manually in the DB) but then their users wouldn't be able to see them anymore. I do get the concern though, if things really start to pickup and we get insane volume, I'm afraid even my instance wouldn't be able to pick up. I'd have to unsubscribe from everything. On the other hand, I think people will come up with solutions as things scale. There's a lot of unknowns right now, too many to build a solution. Just take a look at mastodon and how its model has changed over time.

[–] pzza 2 points 1 year ago

If data is migrated from server to server, as the community grows in size, the data to be maintained on each server also grows in size? Also i've seen some servers allow the creation of new users/communities, but some don't... whats the point of that if the data is just replicated anyway?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I’m up to about 300MB of disk usage after a day of hosting my own. Curious to see how it grows.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

haha better than the 12GB and rising of my single-user Mastodon instance. And this is with deleting my media cache every night.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Mastodon is aggressive with caching media. Akkoma is more lightweight

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. Some of those are lemmy.ml and not a lot of comments, etc have synced yet.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Gotcha, thanks. I'm at about 70 so that makes sense then.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Up to 400MB after two days here. I took a look at the code and it looks like Lemmy keeps all ActivityPub JSON for 6 months. It would be nice if it was possible to shorten that.

I'm still happy that I'm hosting my own instance, but I hope this thing doesn't get too big!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

For personal use, even a Raspberry Pi is sufficient.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My raspberry pi 4 is using 810mb of RAM and 11gb of file system space.

[–] TheInsane42 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's interesting to read. Could an instance be added to an existing setup? (Debian OS)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So long as you can run Docker, I would think that you could setup an instance. You just need to make sure that the image you use for lemmy and lemmy-ui are compatible with your platform. I had to alter the provided docker-compose.yml file to use arm64 versions for my RaspberryPi.

I mentioned the total disk usage for the sake of setting up a pi. I don't know what the space requirements are for lemmy separate from the bulkiness of an Ubuntu 22.04 install.