Heya, I’m trying out Lemmy and kinda like the idea of hosting a Lemmy instance just for me.

I was wondering:

  • What are the hardware/bandwidth requirements for a single user instance?
  • I know different instances can black list each other, but can they whitelist each other too? I don’t want to be automatically unable to see interact with certain instances.
  • Has anyone else done this and have thoughts to share?
  • What about doing the same for Mastodon?
  • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.netEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’m doing both on the cheapest VPS on Hetzner, but needed to add more hard drive space, especially mastodon needs a lot.

  • linuxduck@nerdly.devEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I have both a misskey and lemmy instance. For both I used https://servarica.com/ with the cheapest summer deal Flying Fish SSD. It’s like 55 a year. (Or you can pay monthly but I’d highly suggest to save up and pay yearly) (kinda lie, I got a bigger one for lemmy but it’s overkill)

    If you have never installed software before on a VPS (virtual private server) you’re in for a learning ride. If this is the case, be patient, don’t give up.

    Misskey is similar to mastadon. You can also look into calkey which is similar to misskey.

    The hardest part of setting it up was the settings. But since I already know Docker and whatever it was easy going otherwise.

    Though I still don’t have email working… Bleh

    Misskey you add relays. Relays are like lists of instances to join in the fediverse. You then block instances you don’t like.

    Lemmy, you block instances you don’t approve and can set it up so you can white list as well.

    Also important, lemmy doesn’t automatically add other instances. How it works is, any user on your instances has to subscribe to another using the full search key !blah@domain.tld then once ONE user is subscribed, everyone else can search it via keyword.

    Because of that I created a bot that went through all my approved instances and subscribed to all communities in there. It stopped around 3500 subscribed communities. I’ll have to run it again sometime.

      • linuxduck@nerdly.devEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Good question. Right now it just says 0… With my all but 2 users. The great thing about where I got my servers is you can choose one of two options 100mbps unlimited (which I use) or 1gps for the first 4tb and then throttled to 10mbps.

        So far I see very little impact

      • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.winEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        My personal instance that is pulling in close to the top 500 communities. Over the past week I see about 4 million requests and 17GB data served.

        • sinokon@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          That’s pretty small tbh did expect much more but I guess offloading content traffic to 3rd party does the most heavy lifting. Thanks for the insight!

  • MeatballFlag@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Rather than setting up a VPS like some of you is there a reason I couldn’t run this on my existing home unraid server?

    • idle@158436977.xyz
      English
      1·
      2 years ago

      Yes im doing something similar but you should probably mask your home IP in some way using something like Cloudflare tunnels. Keep in mind the whole idea behind federation is you are advertising yourself to the fediverse.

    • xordos@lonestarlemmy.mooo.comEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      No, you can run it on your own homelab just fine. If you don’t have it already, you just need a (usually free) dynamic subdomain so your instance have a normal URL instead of IP.