this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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I just started renting a basic VPS through Racknerd with the intent to use it as a reverse proxy to point friends to my game server instances running at home without exposing my public IP. I could not figure out how to get it to work so I gave up after days of trying and am now using playit.gg. I prepaid for a year of the VPS. What cool project should I try on it now?

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

lemmy instance 😈

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

An option which covers a bunch of different experiments: set up PiHole on it (despite the name, it doesn't need to be run on a raspberry pi) then set up a persistent VPN, for eg wireguard, or whatever your router supports, to it from where you are, and then setup your router to use it as your DNS server for your vlan.

Its a relatively simple set of tasks, but they build a good grounding for anything else you end up wanting to run on it.

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

Does that introduce any latency? I think the VPS is in CA and I'm in PNW, so somewhat close. I did have pi-hole running locally until just recently. I've switched to Adguard Home instead. I have primary DNS on the pi and secondary on my unRAID server.

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

It might. But anecdotally, I have three instances of Adguard Home that my router uses, one local and two VPS. The fastest is on a VPS, ~7ms average processing time. My local instance is in the teens, probably because I'm abusing that poor machine hosting too much. But a VPS based DNS server is a viable option in my personal experience.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This is exactly what I'm using to host my Mastodon and Lemmy instance. Very, very user-friendly!

The downside is the Lemmy version they support on Yunohost is very old... 16.7. First Yunohost will have to support Debian 12 and then a more recent Lemmy version could be supported. I wish they just used Docker containers for apps instead of having everything in the base system, even though it'd take more RAM.

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

This looks compelling. Thank you

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

You can set up a mail server. You can set up something like Nextcloud. You can set up a personal website, or just run a webserver and turn it into a place to dump files. You can set up something like Syncthing to facilitate sharing files between your devices. You can set up some types of Federated services, but in my experience Mastodon is too heavy for a baseline VPS. I needed to augment my instance with additional memory, CPUs, and an S3-compatible object storage provider for about 600GB of user media. Lemmy might work, but I haven't tried running it on a VPS on the open Internet yet.

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

Whatever you do with your server, you don’t want to run a mail server. Seriously, running your own mail server is such a pain. Just not worth it.

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

Yeah, it's the fastest way to ensure no one sees your emails.

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

600GB of media? How many users did you have? Or does Mastodon cache media from other instances on your own?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not many. Around 100. It does cache media from other instances for a period of 7 days though. This is adjustable, but even if you cut the caching down to one or two days, it will be more than a baseline VPS can handle (at my host, they start at 40GB and by the time you get to my storage needs, a dedicated server is required).

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

Interesting. I think Lemmy only caches thumbnails, but it pulls images from the instance that the post/comment is from.

A beehaw admin said their instance only is taking 25GB total

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

Yeah there are basically trade-offs that need to be decided. You shouldn't need a server farm to start a new small instance, but on the other hand, if everything gets hotlinked from the big instances that can also lead to problems. It also means that when the large instance begins suffering from performance problems or downtime, it directly impacts other instances with broken images and stuff.

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

Nextcloud ran like garbage on my server that has better hardware than the VPS. I love the concept of it though and I would really like if the guy working on Memories could split that out from under NC.

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

I've found that GoToSocial and Calckey both use a lot less in resources than Mastodon does.

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

Akkoma is also much lighter on resources than Mastodon is.

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

You can always try to setup your own lemmy instance. Its better to have smaller instances instead of one big instance.

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