this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Looking to maybe self host my own instance, I'm still learning about the fediverse. If a different instance that I federate with hosts something illegal are there risks to me? Is anything from other instances hosted on my server like a copy of it? Or would I only end up hosting things my users post? I'm paranoid and sorry if this is a silly question.

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

I'm running it in the smallest VPS of vultr with 25GB of disk.
This instance only has 3 users, with me being the only active. It says it's been up for almost a month and I've only used 3GB.

Here are the docker volumes which have the actual data of your instance, and from inside the DB the biggest table is the one called activity which the devs said it's only sometimes used to validate the data, but could be truncated if needed (there's a schedule task which only keeps up to 6 months).
Also the thing to have in mind is to properly configure the logs of whichever installation guide you follow.
After that I've seen other admins say the next biggest is the media uploaded (from bigger instances).

$ du -h --max-depth=1
640K    ./pictrs
3.2G    ./postgres
3.2G    .

lemmy=# select
  table_name,
  pg_size_pretty(pg_relation_size(quote_ident(table_name))),
  pg_relation_size(quote_ident(table_name))
from information_schema.tables
where table_schema = 'public'
order by 3 desc;
         table_name         | pg_size_pretty | pg_relation_size
----------------------------+----------------+------------------
 activity                   | 2187 MB        |       2292867072
 comment                    | 56 MB          |         58212352
 person                     | 48 MB          |         50307072
 comment_like               | 45 MB          |         47161344
 post_like                  | 22 MB          |         22781952
 comment_aggregates         | 14 MB          |         14811136
 post                       | 13 MB          |         13623296
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The activity table is also used to deduplicate incoming federation data, so instead of truncating it, I'd suggest deleting rows after a certain amount of time.

For my personal instance, I set up a cron to delete entries older than 3 days, and my db is only ~500MB with a few weeks of content! I also haven't seen any duplicated posts or comments. Even with Lemmy's retries, 3 days seems to be long enough before dropping rows from that table.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Could you share the cron/script you use to do this? I'm interested in hosting my own Lemmy at some point, and having a script for that cleanup would be hugely helpful for me.

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

Definitely! I'm hosting in Kubernetes so I won't post the full thing, but here's the actual command that I run hourly. Make sure to replace the values for database, username, and password.

PGPASSWORD=password psql --dbname=database --username=username --command="DELETE FROM activity WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '3 days';"
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Awesome, that was just as straightforward as I was hoping it was, thanks! I am more familiar with MySQL as I haven't used Postgres a ton but SQL is SQL after all lol

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

You're welcome! Makes sense. They're somehow so similar yet so different lol

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

Hi - can you help me set this up or share the script that you use to do this? Many thanks :)

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

This is a great idea, thank you!

[–] Thief 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Can you help me set this up also or share the script I would run to do this? Many thanks.

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

Sure! My script will look a little different since I'm hosting Lemmy in Kubernetes, but basically you will want to run the following command hourly. Make sure to replace the values for database, username, and password.

PGPASSWORD=password psql --dbname=database --username=username --command="DELETE FROM activity WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '3 days';"
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You're welcome!

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

Ah! I didn't know exactly what was being used for.
Yeah, then it can only be trimmed, not truncated.

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

I'll have to try this later. Thanks for the tip!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

How are you keeping your pictrs directory so small?

Mine is at about 5GB after two weeks with just a single user. 😬

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

Haha, I don't know xP.
Just checked and it has only one image.

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

Did you configure the pictrs API keys for Lemmy and for pictrs?

If they're not configured then I could see Lemmy not even using pictrs.

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

Ohh!!
That's what's happening, I haven't uploaded any pictures so I didn't noticed, aside from that I'm not sure what are the other use cases of pictrs

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

Don't quote me on it but I think it, besides handling image uploads, caches thumbnails for link posts.

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

I also have around 3GB used for pictrs and I’m not really sure the best way to see what all content is in there.

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

Yeah I haven't uploaded any images on my instance myself. So none of those images are mine. Might do some reading tomorrow and see if there's any mention of this in the past on other communities. It's not an emergency but I'm curious.

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

That's strange. Please let me know what you find out.

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

I had found an old post which indicates that post thumbnails are cached. So I guess there's that.

In case you didn't see it, the OP of this thread realized they didn't setup their pictrs API key.. so I guess it's possible to omit that and lemmy should still work. Not sure about the downsides.