First post from my new, self-hosted, personal instance. Feels good!
♥️
Hello 😎
Welcome aboard, and hello from across the Fediverse!
Good on you for standing up your own instance. It’s certainly nothing to shake a stick at and you’re coming in at the right time when Lemmy just got a big performance boost in v0.18.3 as well as an 80% reduction size in the PostgreSQL database. Good things are happening.
Did the v0.18.3 update of Lemmy really result in an 80% reduction in size in the PostgreSQL database? How did they manage to do it?
Welcome to the club.
You did it! Hello, and welcome to the club. Lemmy has been my first foray into hosting a site on a VPS and it’s been quite the rabbit-hole; for the better of course. I hope you have fun.
This sounds like a fun project to be honest. Are there any risks involved by getting bad content through federation that’s out of your control?
Just a week or so ago I read an article about a guy running a tor exit node personally and being held responsible for the traffic
If you block porn-related instances suchas lemmynsfw and pornlemmy, you’ll drastically reduce your chance of getting CSAM contents on your instance. Not saying those instances promotes that kind of stuff, but many dubious instances (the ones with kiddie/doll banners) federate with them, and might post bad stuff when the mods aren’t looking.
If you’re still super worried about it, you can host your instance behind cloudflare and enable their CSAM scanning tool.
Has anybody managed to get CyberTipline credentials for the CSAM scanning tool? I filled out their form and never heard back.
You’re supposed to contact them at espteam@ncmec.org in order to start the enrollment process, and it seems the service is only for US-based operators.
I did that, but never heard back, and I am US-based… very odd. Thanks for your reply!
These kind of organizations usually take their time when responding email, and certainly not on weekend.
It’s been more than a week, otherwise I’d think the same thing.
I am not completely sure about the risks here, but I think as the sole user on my instance they are pretty low. I think the only way content gets onto my machine is if I post it, if I interact with content on other instances, or if I create a community to which other people from other instances start posting. Despite my handle, there are some crimes I don’t do. I should be okay as long as I don’t mess with illegal content myself and moderate accordingly others’ behavior in my communities.
Yeah pretty much.
It only pulls from communities you have subscribed to. Images aren’t duplicated per server, just text; so even if you find something nasty it’s not hosted by you and you can always delete comments from the database/block users from appearing in your instance.
Tangential - is there any reason a private instance couldn’t just not run a pictrs container? Especially if you’re not creating communities on your instance.
Yeah, but you’d lose out on being able to have a profile banner/photo.
Welcome to the club! I used the same easy deploy setup as you! Makes life really easy eh :)
Furthermore, to populate All, I have this one running: https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
If you do this, you will need some extra space because the database will grow, but I think it solves one of the (largest) downsides of running your own instance, namely discovering other communities.
Thank you for the info. I set my instance up yesterday as well and my goal today was to do this.
Just so you know, this also creates more load on other instances, especially the larger ones.
Hmmm that is not really the small instances “fault”, but that is the idea of the Fediverse…
Do you know how much disk space this will roughly use? Are we talking 10GB or 100GB or 1TB? Just roughly speaking.
Mine went from 8 gb to 20-ish gb. So not that much ;)
The latest really improves things space wise and cleans up better. Single instance here for almost a month. About 50-60 subscription’s and am at 2gb db size
Thank you; bookmarked.
When you decide to set it up, you need to create a user on your instance and fill in those details in the command line to run the thing. Also make sure to change the instance name to your name, otherwise it will not work.
Other useful commands:
docker rm --force lemmy-subscriber-bot To actually destroy the docker container if you want to start over
docker logs lemmy-subscriber-bot To see if the thing is running and doing things.
From the readme:
As of the writing of this tool, and size of the fediverse (Jul 2023), using this tool, may result in disk space usage of around 2GiB/day, according to my own metrics.
Seems kind of steep. I only have 500GB allocated to my server. I feel like there’s got to be a better way.
I have the feeling that this is extremely exaggerated. I only have 40 Gb in total and still have 23 gb free. I don’t run the tool constantly, but run it every once in a while to make sure that my All has interesting communities. If it would be 2 gb/day I would be loooooong over my 40…
Also posting from my own instance! Lemmy verse let’s gooooo
feddit.ie checking in!
Nice! Just me on my instance too. The only downside I’ve found so far is that I have to discover new communities in my own since there is no one else to populate “All”.
Small price to pay to have control over my instance though.
this is just a quick script I came up with, but it will show you newest communities and their descriptions. It refreshes daily. maybe it will be helpful for discovering niche communities : https://lemmyfind.quex.cc/
Yeah it was a bit annoying at first, but I just created a “all” user that just subbed to everything (well not everything, shout-out to all the communities that speak another language). I don’t recall exact links but if you just search for “all bot Lemmy” there are some stuff people have made which will just auto join basically all communities in an instance
I’m really thinking about spinning up my own instant. I joined lemmy.one a while ago and it dark at the moment. After reddit I’m not digging the lack of control… Do you have any recommendations for running your own instant?
I host it on a VPS since I was hesitant about having something like this hosted at home. As far as spinning it up, it was relatively straightforward using the docker instructions (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html).
I ran into some issues with the postfix container not being able to send emails, but it turned out I just needed to ask my VPS provider to unblock port 25 for SMTP.
Thank you for the link. I may try hosting it at home just for kicks.
I started mine at home but quickly came to the same decision as you and moved it out to a VPS.
I use Amazon SES for mail relay.
Nice work :)
I appreciate all of the weird instance names in here
Hehe I needed a login for a Superbowl pool with my kid’s preschool and that’s what I came up with. When my wife saw she couldn’t stop laughing, so it stuck.
Same.
feddit.de checking in
Nice work and welcome to the club!
