Hey. I really like the idea of the fediverse and Lemmy and would want to know as a beginner/not so experienced regarding selfhosting what would be the best way to get started?
I saw there are vps options, but don’t know of I’m looking in the right direction.
Personally… it was an experience to say the least. I went down the Docker path for my instance. I’ve tried to keep away from Docker for ages, but here I am.
I’d recommend using the ansible playbook to get it running, as the docker documentation isn’t very detailed and it gets very confusing; especially for a beginner.
The docker documentation is not kept in sync with the docker-compose.yml it asks you to use. So you download the latest one as per instructions, but that’s being regularly updated with no thought to the documentation also being updated. It’s also doesn’t seem aimed at production deployment, just developer test environments. Then there are stupid simple things like the port number being changed in the docker-compose.yml but not in the nginx.conf or the lemmy.hjson. There desperately needs to be better control of that.
There is a lot wrong there and it doesn’t fill me with confidence. It took me 3 hours to piece it all together last night and had to revert to picking bits out of the ansible documentation.
I was considering it.
There is the cost for the vps which would have to be separate in “quarantine” from the rest of our stuff.
Extra cost. $6/ Month sounds cheap but it’s not unless you really feel the need to spend 5+ hours a day troubleshooting the tech side.
Then there is the risk of becoming a platform for pedophiles and terrrists.
More time going in that for moderating it and not risk getting our cloud account banned because we hosted illegal stuff - even if it’s by mistake it’s still a risk to get the whole account shut down.
Only way I can see this works is for someone who is knowledgeable enough or has trusted people who are knowledgeable to keep the server clean.
It’s a fun experience I bet but too risky.
Learning to setup infra is a great chance but there are other ways to learn and still not contribute to internet filth or spam.
Better a few big sites than 1000 small unmaintained ones.
This is what im going to do when I get a spare few hours to set it up.
Im looking at it in the same way as my searx instance. Just a private portal that will have as much uptime as I can maintain, federated with who I want and no one I dont.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Personally… it was an experience to say the least. I went down the Docker path for my instance. I’ve tried to keep away from Docker for ages, but here I am.
I’d recommend using the ansible playbook to get it running, as the docker documentation isn’t very detailed and it gets very confusing; especially for a beginner.
The docker documentation is not kept in sync with the docker-compose.yml it asks you to use. So you download the latest one as per instructions, but that’s being regularly updated with no thought to the documentation also being updated. It’s also doesn’t seem aimed at production deployment, just developer test environments. Then there are stupid simple things like the port number being changed in the docker-compose.yml but not in the nginx.conf or the lemmy.hjson. There desperately needs to be better control of that.
There is a lot wrong there and it doesn’t fill me with confidence. It took me 3 hours to piece it all together last night and had to revert to picking bits out of the ansible documentation.
Get a cheap linux VPS. My host provides 4 CPU sd and 8G for 8 eur per month which should be enough for something like 500 users.
Then just run the ansible playbook. It will do everything for you
thanks, in VPS, any red flag I should care for? Privacy, monitoring, etc?
Very low bandwidth caps will be a problem with fediverse.
Other than that, check your steal % once you have the VM. If it’s over 20% consistently, you’re being ripped off.
Is this an arm instance on hetzner? I was looking for something cheaper than digitalocean, but I like their networking quality a lot.
I have mine running on the cheapest arm Hetzner instance, working well so far
Glad to hear that!
I didn’t know Lemmy could run on arm architecture. Is your installation with docker?
No, with the Ansible method. I tried the docker method, but it really didn’t want to work for me.
If you go the Ansible way though make sure you’re using a Debian 11 based OS
I was considering it.
There is the cost for the vps which would have to be separate in “quarantine” from the rest of our stuff.
Extra cost. $6/ Month sounds cheap but it’s not unless you really feel the need to spend 5+ hours a day troubleshooting the tech side.
Then there is the risk of becoming a platform for pedophiles and terrrists.
More time going in that for moderating it and not risk getting our cloud account banned because we hosted illegal stuff - even if it’s by mistake it’s still a risk to get the whole account shut down.
Only way I can see this works is for someone who is knowledgeable enough or has trusted people who are knowledgeable to keep the server clean.
It’s a fun experience I bet but too risky.
Learning to setup infra is a great chance but there are other ways to learn and still not contribute to internet filth or spam.
Better a few big sites than 1000 small unmaintained ones.
You don’t have to allow sign-ups, therefor no modding to do if it’s only you.
That’s what I’m doing. Totally closed sign-ups except for a few close irl friends.
This is what im going to do when I get a spare few hours to set it up.
Im looking at it in the same way as my searx instance. Just a private portal that will have as much uptime as I can maintain, federated with who I want and no one I dont.
Same. I’m glad I found this thread because I was wondering if it was ok to do this.