It runs perfectly fine most of the time and then will occasionally lock up my entire server until I reboot.
I’ve been working on getting some better monitoring and log aggregation set up so I can troubleshoot what is actually happening but it’s a bit slow going. As of now I can’t tell if the database is getting overloaded, if the frontend is getting spammed, or what is going on really.
My instance has two users and it runs on a VPC with 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM.
Check the ram usage on postgres. Theres a dataleak issue thats being monitored with a proposed fix in the next version (which is upgrading to the newer version of postgres)
Nothing manual required, you can federate with any other instance as long as you’re not on their ban list.
You basically use your instance’s search to search for a community on the remote instance, then your instance requests the top (5?) posts from the community on the remote instance. Once a user subscribes, all new posts going forward will be sent to your server via the federation.
Federation is open by default but I never post anything to my home instance because no one is there. If I started posting on my own instance other people could theoretically subscribe to my communities the same way I subscribe to communities on other instances but since there are only two users on my instance it’s pretty unlikely people would find it without me crossposting somewhere.
Benefits of me running my own instance are that I control my own user account and I’m not at the whims of another admin. I subscribe to content on lots of other instances and it all federates into mine which means I’ve been able to browse content when some of the big instances go down. I’ve got my own entrypoint to lemmy which feels a bit more neutral than choosing another instance to be ‘home’ for my user.
Downsides are that I have to pay for and maintain it myself which can sometimes be a serious pain. Because my instance only has two users my ‘local’ feed is basically a copy of my ‘subscribed’ feed plus a couple posts from communities that my wife subscribes to that I don’t. That can make it hard to find new content without using something like lemmyverse.net.
If you’re thinking about hosting your own instance I encourage you to give it a shot. I’d highly recommend the lemmy-ansible project on github which is both a guide and playbook for deploying the various lemmy docker containers using ansible. I’m a sysadmin by trade so running services like this is something I’m pretty familiar with but I’ve still found myself frustrated by Lemmy more than once. It’s still a young project and can be frustratingly brittle and difficult to troubleshoot. That being said it’s been a great learning experience and makes me feel like I’m doing my part to contribute to a better and more decentralized web.
Because my instance only has two users my ‘local’ feed is basically a copy of my ‘subscribed’ feed plus a couple posts from communities that my wife subscribes to that I don’t.
But if you switch to “all” instead of subscribed and sort by active or hot you see the popular posts on all of lemmy, right? And you see all the communities under /communities link?
No. Only communities that at least one local user is subscribed to is federated into that instance.
And I realize I made a mistake in the feed names. My local feed is completely empty. My ‘all’ feed is what I was intending to describe with that comment. It is just the communities that either my wife or I have subscribed to. I haven’t done this yet but I was reading about a project that admins can add to their instance that effectively creates a phantom user to subscribe to lots of content all across the fediverse. It’s intended to help bridge the gap between very small instances and the rest of the fediverse by ensuring that your ‘all’ feed actually aggregates content from other instances without requiring you to subscribe.
I’m blanking on the name and can’t find the posts I saved about it, but I’d really like to try it out to make it easier to come across new communities organically without having to hunt them down.
It’s very unlikely I’m going to run my own instance, although I would like the freedom to tinker with the web client. Probably going to try to just run the UI client locally at some point.
I run my own tiny instance so that I can feel special. And so that I can overspend on cloud infrastructure and stress out about uptime.
How does lemmy run for you? I get weird blocks of bad gateway every once in a while
It runs perfectly fine most of the time and then will occasionally lock up my entire server until I reboot.
I’ve been working on getting some better monitoring and log aggregation set up so I can troubleshoot what is actually happening but it’s a bit slow going. As of now I can’t tell if the database is getting overloaded, if the frontend is getting spammed, or what is going on really.
My instance has two users and it runs on a VPC with 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM.
Check the ram usage on postgres. Theres a dataleak issue thats being monitored with a proposed fix in the next version (which is upgrading to the newer version of postgres)
Thank you! I was secretly hoping someone might have a quick suggestion of something to try. I’ll see what I can find out.
Yeah no problem! My workaround solution is simply just restarting the postgres container when i notice ram usage spiking
beautiful human being
How does federation work with hosting your own instance? Do you need to request federation with instances or is yes the default?
Was thinking of hosting my own instance just to tinker around with
Nothing manual required, you can federate with any other instance as long as you’re not on their ban list.
You basically use your instance’s search to search for a community on the remote instance, then your instance requests the top (5?) posts from the community on the remote instance. Once a user subscribes, all new posts going forward will be sent to your server via the federation.
At least I think that’s how it works, haha.
Federation is open by default but I never post anything to my home instance because no one is there. If I started posting on my own instance other people could theoretically subscribe to my communities the same way I subscribe to communities on other instances but since there are only two users on my instance it’s pretty unlikely people would find it without me crossposting somewhere.
Benefits of me running my own instance are that I control my own user account and I’m not at the whims of another admin. I subscribe to content on lots of other instances and it all federates into mine which means I’ve been able to browse content when some of the big instances go down. I’ve got my own entrypoint to lemmy which feels a bit more neutral than choosing another instance to be ‘home’ for my user.
Downsides are that I have to pay for and maintain it myself which can sometimes be a serious pain. Because my instance only has two users my ‘local’ feed is basically a copy of my ‘subscribed’ feed plus a couple posts from communities that my wife subscribes to that I don’t. That can make it hard to find new content without using something like lemmyverse.net.
If you’re thinking about hosting your own instance I encourage you to give it a shot. I’d highly recommend the lemmy-ansible project on github which is both a guide and playbook for deploying the various lemmy docker containers using ansible. I’m a sysadmin by trade so running services like this is something I’m pretty familiar with but I’ve still found myself frustrated by Lemmy more than once. It’s still a young project and can be frustratingly brittle and difficult to troubleshoot. That being said it’s been a great learning experience and makes me feel like I’m doing my part to contribute to a better and more decentralized web.
But if you switch to “all” instead of subscribed and sort by active or hot you see the popular posts on all of lemmy, right? And you see all the communities under /communities link?
No. Only communities that at least one local user is subscribed to is federated into that instance.
And I realize I made a mistake in the feed names. My local feed is completely empty. My ‘all’ feed is what I was intending to describe with that comment. It is just the communities that either my wife or I have subscribed to. I haven’t done this yet but I was reading about a project that admins can add to their instance that effectively creates a phantom user to subscribe to lots of content all across the fediverse. It’s intended to help bridge the gap between very small instances and the rest of the fediverse by ensuring that your ‘all’ feed actually aggregates content from other instances without requiring you to subscribe.
I’m blanking on the name and can’t find the posts I saved about it, but I’d really like to try it out to make it easier to come across new communities organically without having to hunt them down.
Ah thanks, very interesting to know.
It’s very unlikely I’m going to run my own instance, although I would like the freedom to tinker with the web client. Probably going to try to just run the UI client locally at some point.
Great write up, thank you
Some follow up, what are the costs related?
I assume you have to pay for a domain.
I already run my own media server from home and I have a spare PC, are you just saying the electrical costs or do you pay for server hosting?