this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Lemmy

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Selfhosting single person instance? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello. I'm considering hosting a 1-person instance for my personal use. I'm trying to run on my own hardware, and I have used *nix for quite a long time and maintaining it wouldn't be much of a problem. However, I'm not quite sure what kind of hardware should I run it on.

How powerful should my hardware be? Say, would it be OK on a old PC with Northwood Celeron and 512mb of ram with 384GB HDD? Or maybe an android phone running postmarketOS (Alpine Linux) with MSM8916 and 2GB of ram with 32GB eMMC?

Also, my ISP does not allow opening common server hosting ports, and I'd also prefer not doing so due to security problems. Which ports do I need opened to operate a lemmy instance for my personal use (i'm only going to be connecting from home)? Can I use CloudFlare's cloudflared/Argo Tunnel to do this? (I do know CloudFlare is not great and has problems but I'm not aware of any other similar service, I'm not really able to pay for external servers but if there's an alternative service I'm open to suggestions)

Thanks for reading the post, and hopefully answering.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is your intention to have local copies of content from popular servers and read it locally? Major communities like news., memes, etc?

Many people seem to think this is offloading the major servers like lemmy.world - but I think the opposite is true in my measures of how lemmy_server performs. There is a lot of overhead to each additional instance in Lemmy 0.18.3 backend. Lemmy code does a lot of work to keep each of these subscribing servers updated with every post, comment, vote, person - attempted in real-time.

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

I have multiple purposes - while I do trust the folks running instances and my current lemmy.world instance they may close service at any time and I wanted to ensure that I won't have to move instances, and I'm also considering to run my own E-Mail in my personal domain later so I thought it would be nice to have lemmy and etc (my online presence) connected to my domain. Also yes, I was thinking I might help reduce server costs for others and stuff but that doesn't seem to be the case..

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

I would not recommend running your own email server. Major email providers like gmail only accept email from servers that have all kinds of measures in place to make them as trustworthy as possible. That's hard and probably not possible on a home internet connection.

Filtering incoming spam is also a pain in the ass.

It's nice as an exercise to learn how email works, but I would not rely on it.

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

I currently use disroot mail. Maybe I'll just donate and connect my domain and still keep using that provider.. Though, having your own domain for emails would be cool. Can use all different addresses for signup on each websites. I wouldn't have to worry about spams at all that way.. (Disroot provides aliases, [email protected] for receiving but the + sign causes error on some poorly made sites)

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

I use my own domain and have support for aliases and also have a catch all. No need to selfhost for that.

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

Which provider are you on?

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

One you don't wanna join ;) (Google). I'm still on the free tier of what's now Workspace and intent to move, but I'm dreading the work that comes with it.

A year or so ago Google almost killed the free tier (look up gsuite legacy if you want to know more). Back then I prepared to move away and settled on Zoho as my replacement, but in the end Google responded to the community's backlash and kept the free tier free for personal use (although there are some other restrictions put in place, so eventually a move is inevitable). Zoho might also give you the features you want.

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

An anti social network. Nice.

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

A single person instance, not federated, and isolated. I can post, comment and moderate. Nobody can downvote me, NOBODY! :-)

I do think OP intends to federate though.

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

Haha, that wasn't really the purpose, I intend to federate and communicate

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Lemmy is actually quite light.. My lemmy VM is currently using only 317MB of the 1GB I've allocated it, and about half of a 16GB disk.

Obviously I'm not subscribing to every possible group there.. only a dozen or so.. but I could go a lot bigger without it becoming a problem.

TBH I'd use the celeron and get a bigger RAM stick in there (cheap), and you'll be fine for a 1 person instance.

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

Sweet, seems like lemmy is pretty lightweight on resources overall. Thanks for the reply :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How long have you been running it? My personal kbin instance filled its 100gb disk, with media, after only a few weeks.

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

Month or so.. It isn't growing much, seems to be quite aggressive in its pruning of old stuff.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ah nice. Lemmy does better in that regard. I know kbin isn't pruning anything yet.

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

How powerful should my hardware be?

I think 512mb ram is probably a bit too low. There is a risk for the pc to crash at some point. I think 1 GB+ should be fine.

Which ports do I need opened to operate a lemmy instance for my personal use (i’m only going to be connecting from home)?

To avoid opening ports you can use Cloudflare tunnel as you mentioned.

Only other option is probably renting a cheap vps. Here is a cheap vps options for 2.5$

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

I see. I think I'll try finding a cheap second hand laptop and run it as a server. (Technically even includes a UPS lol)

The VPS also seems nice, I'll look into it. Thanks!

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

Actually thinking about the same. Not too familiar with how Lemmy works generally (please don't kick me for the question), but won't there be problems with federating to/from other popular instances?

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

I'm also quite unfamiliar with lemmy architecture haha. Well unless the instance I'm trying to federate with defederates/bans my instance, I guess I'll be ok but I don't know.. I'm currently searching for information :)