terribleplan

1. You host it yourself
2. You can get a cool domain name
3. It’s pretty low maintenance

I run my own for myself and some friends who don’t really use it. If you are interested in doing so I say give it a shot.

So, hear me out… What if we put a scheme in place where anyone who wanted to use the API had to pay for access? And then we charge like 20x what we should to put them out of business. I am sure that would work out well.

Yep, nobody is talking about it at all…

• https://prime8s.xyz/post/3812
• https://lemmy.ml/post/1409164
• https://lemmy.one/post/337062
• https://lemmy.world/post/1079916
• https://lemmy.world/post/1060627
• https://lemmy.one/post/629353

As someone who hosts a bunch of other stuff already including my own email (because I am a madman), does stuff like this as a job, has developer experience, etc. it was simple.

Figuring each of these things out (and how they all work together) for the first time was a hell of a journey.

Asklemmy isn’t really a place to ask about lemmy, it’s for asking general questions to users of lemmy, jut like you wouldn’t ask for Reddit support in /r/askreddit.

Regardless, this question gets asked and talked about in the !selfhosted@lemmy.world community fairly often, here is a (slightly edited) comment I made a while back.

You will need a domain name, you can buy one from a registrar such as hover or namecheap (for the love of all that you consider holy do not use godaddy).

You will need a way to expose the server that you set up via port forwarding or similar on your network.

You will need to set up DNS records on the domain you buy to point to your home IP. You may want to figure out a different way to avoid just handing that information out, cloudflare can help with that. You will want to make sure the DNS records get automatically updated if your IP address changes, which is not uncommon for residential ISPs.

You will need to figure out how to get an SSL certificate, Let’s Encrypt will issue them for free, cloudflare gives you one if you use them as a reverse proxy.

Some of this would likely be easier to do on a cloud provider like digitalocean or linode and could be done reasonably cheaply.

These are all common things for setting up any website, so lemmy docs won’t cover them. In addition to those (this answer was just addressing “how to get a URL”) you will need to install and configure lemmy, lemmy-ui, postgres, and pictrs somewhere (the join-lemmy docs cover this well).

If you want your instance to send emails you will have to figure out how you want to do that (too many options to cover in this answer).

When 0.18.1 gets released if you want captcha you’ll probably have to figure out an mCaptcha provider or set that up yourself.

Not to mention thinking about backups, high availability, etc, etc.

As far as hardware to host on you could get away with like ~$10/mo on most any cloud provider, run it on a Mini-PC in your closet, etc. My instance uses 1-2 GB of RAM, ~13GB of disk (and growing a few hundred MB per day), and ~30% of a CPU (an old i5).

Best of luck.

1. Up to you, I would just avoid big instances like .world or .ml. People do congregate on big instances in most of the fediverse, so IDK that “professional” enters into it. It’s not as if you’re running a law firm on a @hotmail email address. I like hosting stuff for myself, so I am running my own instance.
2. For yourself you could get away with spending around $5-$10/mo, plus ~$10/yr for the domain name. More users/load would need more resources, .world is spending >$150/mo for the server(s) alone, and that will only grow as the instance grows.
3. Big thing would be site-wide moderation and managing federation. Dealing with reports, illegal content, communities that break server rules, users that are harassing others, etc. If you slack too much on that (or have overly lax policies) you may end up defederated by instances. Making the decision to defederate other instances. Etc.
4. Entirely gone.
5. Mostly just changes what you’d see on local. Federation can be wonky/slow at times, but that is true of federation between big instances as well, it’s just something you have to get used to when using Lemmy.

I mean, lots of providers have free trials (including some of the ones I mentioned), that 4Cx24G instance will cost like $100/mo (which is pretty competitive TBF) and you get a $300 credit for signing up… Oracle’s actual free tier is 2 VMs with 1/8Cx1GB each (which is pretty neat).

Also, I would just never consider Oracle for cloud hosting or anything else, because fuck Oracle. They’re worse than IBM. Larry Ellison is a lawnmower.

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. You can do it quite cheaply. It is feasible to run on a ~$5/mo VPS (Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean, Scaleway, etc) if you are willing to suffer potential downtime if things go wrong on that one machine. Eventually you might run out of image storage, but that can offloaded to any object storage provider such as those offered by the cloud hosts I listed or ones run by e.g. AWS (S3), Wasabi, Cloudflare (R2), etc.
4. If you know nothing about servers, linux, docker, postgres, reverse proxies, netwroking, http, etc. then it may not be worth it to you. I like the idea of having complete control over what servers I federate with. I like the idea of having a built-in archive of everything I read and write on Lemmy. Running an instance is of minimal cost to me because I already run software (including postgres, the database Lemmy uses as well as my own email server) for myself so it is low impact to add just one more service. Ultimately there are so many variables that you have to decide it for yourself.

If you want some general advice on how to set things up or certain things you need to make sure are done right so your instance works feel free to reach out. If you want to check out a smaller instance (I am the only regular user, but have a few friends that use my instance from time to time) feel free to sign up for mine to see what it might be like.

Exactly, your instance stores what you post (local) on it and what gets federated to it (cache, basically). You search those local and cached things. To do it some other way would basically man that either all instances somehow discover each other and send everything to each other all the time or your instance somehow discovers and searches all other instances when you do a search.

There has been talk about something that should make things better as far as “couldnt_find_community” more or less auto-searching a remote community when you go to a /c/community@example.com sort of link so the experience is less jarring and doesn’t require you to know you have to do a search.

Pretty much, yeah. This is why external discovery tools (like browse.feddit.de and others) are so important and useful. Also posing to any of the new community or community announcement/discovery meta communities. Also sidebars linking to other related communities like on that other site.

Not sure if it’s relevant as pretending to be form Germany may be the point here, but “Tor clients” aren’t “from” anywhere you can know, that’s just where the exit node is located.

Users on those instances need to search for your community then subscribe, only will then new posts/votes/comments show up. Federation is opt-in, not automatic.

They have been tuning the algorithm for that in the past releases, so may be related to that. Also, there is/was a bug where if you don’t restart lemmy (on the server) regularly stuff will get stuck at the top of hot and/or active.

See also:

https://lemmy.ml/c/konosuba

!konosuba@lemmy.ml

Konosuba

Seems like most of the Tesla shills haven’t really made it over to the fediverse yet, so that’s nice.

What I thought that logo was:

Or if you just don’t want to give your “proper” phone number out to every single company out there to add to their spam list, sell on to anyone else, and give away for free every time they have a data breach. I use GV out of necessity for blocking spam calls.

Which is why (much to my chagrin as someone who has only given out their GV number for 10+ years) many companies are blocking numbers identified as VOIP even if they are capable of doing SMS/MMS, and some even go so far as to block prepaid phones. This was a component of that whole Overwatch 2 phone number controversy: not only were they requiring a phone number to play despite people’s battle.net accounts being years old, but they were also preventing some people from using their completely legitimate phone numbers.

Yeah, they should really consider not accepting new users until that is figured out, honestly. There are plenty of servers out there that people can join at this point. Too much centralization in a decentralized system for my liking regardless of instance scaling.