Just keep in mind that if your server dies, or you stop running it for any reason, all the content and user accounts are gone. It doesn't really feel like something that should be taken lightly.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Why can't it just be a vanity instance that you use for yourself and friends, with most of your posting being done on larger instances? There's at least one I've seen like this which seems to be private.
I actually have an interest in doing this as well. One concern though. Wouldn't standing up a Lemmy instance on you own network and federating potentially attract unwanted attention to your IP? Would it be better to host on a VPS instead?
You can always do stuff like proxy through cloudflare. My instance is proxied.
Interesting, I'll need to look into that.
You could get a second static IP address from your ISP to keep it isolated from your home network. That may require additional hardware.
So yeah, probably cheaper to use a cloud based solution. Unless you want the experience of setting that stuff up.
What exactly do you mean with "potentially attract unwanted attention to your IP"? Any public IP attracts automated bot probing, regardless of what you host on it... and the rest is pretty much FUD by VPN snake-oil vendors.
If you really don't want people to know your home ip, then you can use cloudflare's proxying service for all you internet facing services.
Small instances don't seem to require anything major, I'm running mine on a VM with 4c/6gb ram/256gb disk with no issues- it's just a few Docker pods. Just make sure you use a dynamic DNS provider if you're hosting from home, as valid SSL is required to connect to the federation.
Any concerns you that you may attract attention to your network? I'm interested in doing the same thing you are.
I've got all my home services routed through ZeroTier to Nginx Proxy Manager on a cloud VM, so my home IP is pretty well hidden. As long as nobody is uploading illegal content to your instance you should be fine though.
Dope, I'll look into that as well. I think im going to start with cloudflare tunnels. I've heard of it, but never used it. I think this may be my first appropriate use case.
You could also get a second static IP address from your ISP to keep it separate from your home network.
Is it possible to run an instance without a static IP address?
Yes, you can use the Cloudflare proxy and update your dynamic IP with ddclient: https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/how-to/managing-dynamic-ip-addresses
Thanks for sharing this!
From a local device in your home, no, not that I know of. It might be possible with some wild proxy and port forward setup, but that's a little above my head tbh.
A good frame of reference would be the VPS that lemmy.world is running on imo. Looks like they upgraded to a 4 core/16gb setup to handle the influx of users, so if your instance is running under 1k users, I believe those specs would be sufficient.
If it starts chugging, I wonder how well it'd work to run the server on the laptop and the DB on a VPS (or vice versa).
This probably informs me as to my idea. I had a Raspberry Pi sitting around on a shelf somewhere, and wasn't sure if it could handle an instance for a few basics. Sounds impractical.
I suppose it depends. An 4/8gb RPi 4 may be able to handle a smalll instance, keeping in mind that a 2 core/4gb VPS has sufficed for most instances until the recent influx. My concern with using one would be primarily with storage capacity and speeds, but iirc, there's a SATA hat you can get to connect drives directly (as opposed to external USB storage).
Yeah it would work, but home internet bandwidth is the bigger concern here. I don't unfortunately can't estimate a user count.
That's a good point. My entire household, which is just me, average's about 500 Mbps download and 25 MBps upload. Is that pretty low for a server?
Should be fine.
Should be able to handle a few users OK. You might want a more permanent server to run it on if they want to keep using it long term though.
Probably a dumb question, but how does hosting your own instance work? I'd love to help but do I then need to provide content? Or is it more of an admin type situation?
do I then need to provide content?
No. You manage the server, and manage people registering. If it is enabled, they create communities (I.e. subreddits) and provide content. They can also use other server communities via federation.
Its all a matter of how much traffic you want to handle. You can certainly start there but its not going to scale if you had a size-able community
I am not sure how hosting your own instance helps anyone thought. It's fun and it let you own/host your data, but it's not something that help the fediverse unless you have a lot of users which would be too much to the other instances?
You will need to fine-tune the database a bit, but generally speaking this hardware should be sufficient for a medium sized instance < 1000 members or so. What kind of connection do you have? Lemmy itself is not very bandwidth heavy, but image storage and remote access can be somewhat problematic if you have a very slow upload speed.