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.
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Do yourself a favour and don't host it, yet. Lemmy is not quality software. You have 3 options here:
Best of luck!
Crashing and burning would be similar to most my other projects
I mean... You'd learn so much. Crash and burn maybe, but call it a win for all the knowledge you gain in the process.
Crashing and burning (in a non-production environment) is an excellent motivator to develop necessary skills; being unafraid to break things and fix them when they inevitably break helps you get a deeper understanding of how the systems work, for what it's worth.
And crashing and burning in a production environment is an excellent thing to laugh at in 20 years
Agree with others here. Ansible isn't for beginners and neither is a Lemmy instance.
Try some other projects first, maybe some docker containers that involve a reverse proxy.
For example, NextCloud is a very useful thing to set up as a project, but I would say that you specifically need the new Pi 5 with plenty of RAM for that. The Pi 4 doesn't handle a full NextCloud installation well.
I have the pi5 with 8gb of ram. Is that enough?
Oh yeah I think so. Honestly NextCloud is slow on any platform, so don't be surprised if you're not impressed. But it's a neat project to set up.
You tried what exactly earlier today?
I was following the steps on the Lemmy-ansible github page
And which step in this process did you get stuck, and what were the errors, if any?
You gotta give us some more info here.
Step 7. I dont have the errors now but I don't think I had ansible or ssh set up correctly
I dont really understand it as this is the first thing I am trying to selfhost other than a minecraft server.
SSH may be installed on the pi but may need to be enabled. That was the second to last bullet point in the requirements. The final on being to install Ansible. If you did not get the requirements taken care of, installation will not be successful.
Please first try to SSH into your pi. Once you have that done, you should install Ansible. After that, you should be able to run the playbook from step 7 and we can proceed from there.
Do I do that from my normal pc? I've never used ssh before
I’m not trying to be mean, but I think you might be trying to jump straight into the deep end before learning to swim. While the commands have been included in the guide in order for you to be able to install this, it really does help to understand what those commands do, and what they mean. I suggest first getting to know your pi a little bit better, learning how to get SSH going on that and then moving on to installing Ansible. There’s information on the raspberry pie website on how to get SSH enabled on your pi.
Alright, thanks for trying to help. Will I need ssh on my main pc to get it to work on my pi?
It should already be there if it’s a Win or Linux, you just need to enable SSH on the pi, then you can remote into it by running this from a command line / shell:
Where ‘pi’ is your user on your pi, and ‘1.2.3.4’ is the IP address or hostname for the pi.
Just want to add too that installing and hosting something like Lemmy is not really a beginner task. I’m not trying to discourage, quite the opposite. You should just know this will be a challenging endeavor, but will be rewarding once you do complete it, and you will learn a lot in the process.
No not really. You first enable it on the raspberry pie. Then you access your raspberry pie from your normal computer by running this command in your command line or shell: ssh [email protected] where ‘user’ is your raspberry pi user (pi by default), and ‘1.2.3.4’ is the ip address of the pi.
Bold of u to assumw they are using linux as there main pc os. If they are using windows i beleive it doesnt come with an ssh client.
You can SSH using command line. I do have a Windows Pro license, but I THINK that it's not exclusive to Pro....
Huh i vagly remember needing putty but i havnt used windows in almost 5years now.
Yeah I also installed putty a long time ago, I forget if it was actually necessary or if I was just afraid of command line back then.
Yeah, legit, I've messed around with this kind of thing before, and I wouldn't attempt to run lemmy myself. Major pain in the ass.
Also in the comment this one is replying to, I meant to say set up correctly
As a self taught self-hosting enthusiast i wouldn't recommend ansible to a beginner. I know that sounds backwards as absible makes everything easy and does all the work for you but that's also part of the problem. It would be like jumping behind the wheel of a self driving car without knowing how to drive at all. When (not if) something goes wrong it could go wrong hard and you'd lose the whole instance.
It's better to start with some other self hosted projects that interest you to get a feel for the process and software like docker then work your way up to bigger things like lemmy. I consider myself fairly versed in the process and lemmy still gave me some issues to set up and my pixelfed instance still won't federate despite my best efforts. I'm pretty sure i know the issue, i just need to get around to fixing it.
Last thought, the raspberry pi is a pretty impressive little pc for it's size and price point but you might find yourself quickly burning through resources depending on the number of active users you have and how heavily you use it.
Learning how to use your pi to run a reverse proxy to a self hosted blogging site would give you plenty of hands on starter experience. Run docker and portainer and mess with docker config files from a webgui to see what work and what doesn't.
I agree completely with self hosting lemmy for a beginner. But disagree completely about ansible.
Learning to script your environment is extremely useful for stability, maintainability, and security.
Could you give somd examples of something to selfhost? I am only really aware of selfhosting lemmy and other fediverse stuff
Replace existing online services you use with self hosted ones.
So, I'm not new to this (omg it's been 6+ years now wtf) but I don't host a lot of stuff, and it's been pretty easy to poke at; I've got:
Running in docker containers, along with a few of the built-in plug-and-play services on my nas. Of that list, plex, minecraft, freshrss, rustdesk, and vaultwarden were very easy to setup in my situation. Rustdesk is a really good remote control program/service, vaultwarden is a fork of the bitwarden server, and plex was almost comically simple to get going as a media host.
I'm still getting my pieces together for my first server but I'm definitely gonna look into actual!
You could set up a dns based ad-blocker like pihole and a vpn like wireguard to tunnel your phone back into your home network so you have ad-blocking on the go, too. That's a semi beginner protect with plenty of tutorials to pick from.
You could run nextcloud, syncthing, or immich to make your own cloud at home but that might need more than a basic pi setup.
I actually set up pihole today!
It's a great software to run. I like to watch youtube tutorials that explain things step by step so i can understand what happens. If i find a good video i'll see what other software that channel may have a tutorial on and if that software may interest me.
Find some nerd and offer him feet pics to do it for you. Thats how I handle most of life's problems.
Alternatively, if you are artistically talented, offer to draw them yiff in exchange for tech help. Humans are so 1990s.
This is the way
This is the one I use to host on a vps. No clue on it's deployability on a pi.
https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
It's auto installs and updates. Just need to forward the DNS for your instance to whatever domain name you like. It's pretty straight forward from the documentation.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 2 acronyms.
[Thread #378 for this sub, first seen 27th Dec 2023, 03:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I host it in a Truenas BSD Jail, and the process was as straightforward as compiling and running any other Rust / Postgres project. Which error did you get?