This is corny, but thanks for being awesome! It feels so nice to see this community grow out of a shared vision of what the internet should be.
Standing up my little instance has been a blast! I’m not quite done with it, but your combined enthusiasm gives me hope for the future of the internet. 😊
Any insights on to the cost of running an instance? Talking about cloud based solutions.
I haven’t seen what will happen in the long run, but I’m running my one-person instance on a Linode nano server with 1 CPU core and 1GB RAM, which costs $5. Bought a domain for $2.50/year. Seems to be running fine so far, but I might eventually end up moving it to my local unraid server if I have problems with resources.
If you host your own 1 person server, you can federate with everyone else correct? Also, how is your storage usage looking with just one person?
willemijn@derp:~/lemmy/volumes$ sudo du -hs postgres/ 3.0G postgres/This is the PostgreSQL database on a freshly-rebuilt server (that is, one with a small WAL) which has been running for nearly 3 weeks now.
Yes, you can absolutely choose yourself, who you federate with. But I would look for ready-made blocklists and go from there. There’s stuff out there you just don’t want to see or even interact with.
for something small and personal, trivial if you can handle a bit of linuxfu
youll spend less dollars on this than twitter.
beehaw.org recently posted detailed June financials, and the bottom line is something like $600/month, including 1TB of bandwidth overage, for one of the largest public instances (they’re not responding atm or I would post the link). Before the reddit exodus, lemmy.ml was the largest instance, and it was running a couple thousand users on a $100/month VPS. Lemmy.world has posted itself running on a 32-core/64 thread 128GB RAM dedicated server at hetzner. https://blog.mastodon.world.
For an instance with only a few users, like friends & family, it should be pretty cheap.