Do you trust yourself to sustain this considerable commitment?
If you self host a community how would anyone find it?
post it in New Communities and also it should show in Lemmy Explorer
I’m hosting one right now. Lemmyunchained.net
But in will have to Limit Users at some point.
I dont Think people properly understand they can be on any server. And join multiple communities. And it all Show up in their Feed. They don’t Need to worry about “which community has the Most Users”
It doesn’t quite all show up the feed no matter what instance someone is on. In order for content to federate on an instance someone on that instance has to directly access it. I think this is why small niche instances appear to have a trickle of content on “all”.
Sorry. Was a typo. Says can join* any community and it show up on the feed. They need to join first. Yeas.
One person on your instance needs to join for the community to appear. That is the major benefit of joining a large instance, you don’t need to search other instances or use 3rd party tools to find new communities.
There is a lemmy seed script you can use as an admin that gets you a “default sub” experience https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
I’ve seen something like 8 comments pointing people towards their own servers.
Which essentially guarantees a level of community fragmentation as to prevent community growth, cohesive, or general activity does it not?
Ideally each community “group” would have their own Lemmy instance.
Yeh. There’s a few servers that donut really well. Lemmy.nsfw is probably the best example I think.
Yes they can be on any instance, but I’m starting to get worried about the number of communities that are on Lemmy.world
Can you move a community once it’s created?
Nope, it has to manually be setup again, and you’d have to get everyone to subscribe to the new one as well.
Nope, but that would be an awesome new feature!
Why is that worrying?
It disregards the benefits of a distributed platform. Imagine if the admins went rouge, or the server data was irreversibly lost, suddenly all that content would be gone or under the authoritarian rule of the admins. Bit dramatic but you get the point.
If the majority of content is on there, we’ve quite literally taken a decentralised system and centralised it lol
On a more technical level, it takes quite some ressources for a server to broadcast their communities to all other lemmy instances.
“Receiving” a remote community is just reading data and inserting it in your instance. But if a community is hosted on your instance, you have to send that data to each and every instances with at least one user subscribed to it.
So it’s really better for everyone to spread out on as many instances as possible. The only thing I would recommend before setting up a community (or your user account) on an instance is to check if you align with their moderation rules/code of conduct.
No. I think the other instances would need to purge that content right? I could be wrong.
Assuming it’s federated. And someone from your server is subscribed to that community.
We did it
redditerr… sorry guys… old habits and all
Communities are inherently tied to the instance on which they are created and cannot be moved. If the instance is overloaded then that community will not federate properly. If the instance goes down nobody can post to the community. If the instance goes away that community goes away (except for the “cache” that other instances have).
Hmm. I’m not sure if that’s the case. I’m interested to see what the plan is for account migration. Weather posts will follow the user. Or stay with the instance.
Migration of ActivityPub stuff is pretty rough… Everything has an ID, and that ID is the URL, so the ID of the post you replied to is literally
https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/227095… AFAIK there are some (non-standard, at least not in core AP) ways you can mark things to be like “yeah, this moved to over here”, but that isn’t built in to the spec so whether those mechanisms actually work is a crapshoot.I think we should expect/aim to just have some “mass repost script” that can take an extract of a community’s content and just “repost” it on a new community.
Basically, a script that would “replay” a community in one go. I don’t know if you could create “new comments” that immitates perfectly the original commenter but that would be the idea for a quick and very dirty “community mover script”.
A bit like in GIT when you want to change/remove a specific commit, you can only replay/rebuild everything from the start by creating new everything posts/comments.
Or maybe that’s a terrible plan ;)
Looking at my sql databases, I noticed there’s other identifiers on users and content. Not the url.
It may be that the url is linked to the ID. And that ID can just change.
I’m pretty much a noob. Just a lurker on the matrix chats.
I’m talking purely from an ActivityPub/Activity Streams/Activity Vocabulary/JSON-LD perspective. There are some other local identifiers for things in Lemmy, but those do not matter for the purposes of federation. Any Object that is federated is expected to have an ID that is a URL at which you can make a
GETrequest with the properAcceptheader and you will get the latest version of that Object. AFAIK there is no provision for IDs to change.
When lemmy.world will disappear, that’ll be a lot of communities (and valuable information) that go with it.
I don’t know if that’s the intention of Lemmy. It’s not Reddit. It’s not an encyclopaedia.
But I get that it would be annoying.
My understanding is that other instances would need to purge Lemmy.works for that info to all disappear.
Unless I am mistaken, when the instance you sign up with dies, so does your account? Obviously your content and potentially profile will exist in some state, but you would no longer be able to authenticate, so for all intents and purposes your account is gone.
While that won’t matter for some, for others that means there is some importance in the decision of where you create your account. Since, once that instance decides to shut down (or if it happens to defederate,) your account goes with it.
Which is exactly why you should self-host. No one to blame but yourself when your instance goes down/away.
Sadly this idea doesn’t mesh well with how communities work given those are inherently tied to an instance, unlike e.g. hashtags on Mastodon. It would suck if some community goes away just because the instance admin got tired of running it.
Yeh. But that’s happened with some of the biggest instances too. I know there are plans to be able to migrate your profile from one instance to another. Once that’s implemented, no reason to mass bombard any particular instance.
Haha, happened to my original account as well actually. lemme.ml must have had a rollback soon after I created my account last month, because it was gone when I tried to log in a week or so ago. So I get your point.
deleted by creator
Out of curiosity what has the disk usage growth looked like so far for your lemmy instance? I occasionally selfhost but I’m not a hardcore datahorder or anything so the replication of data from instances you subscribe to has me on the fence.
Lady i checked, it was about 21g used from a 1tb ZFS pool.
My instance isn’t minuscule though. Few months old and only 20 users. I’m curious about longer term growth though. No idea how long 1tb will last, but I have more of need be.
(This is my little lab)
Damn that setup is no joke. 21GB in a few months initially sounded like a lot to me… but I decided to math it out. Lets say the 20gb was across 1,2 or 3 months…
Time till 1tb would fill up. +------+-----------+----------+----------+ | | 3 months | 2 months | 1 month | | 1 TB | ~12 years | ~8 years | ~4 years | +------+-----------+----------+----------+That data usage is looking pretty reasonable… Even 20gb per month is something that wouldn’t be too hard to keep up with and I’m sure eventually there’ll be a way to clean up old posts that no one on your instance saved or commented on if you are trying to save space. I’d start to worry if disk usage was hitting closer to 40gb a month.
i wish there was a way to show the growth over time, because obviously some is taken up by the OS, then all the initial setup of lemmy. I’ll keep an eye on it as it grows.
Grafana + something like influxdb+telegraf would do the trick. It sounds like you don’t have metric gathering like that on your instance? If that’s the case I’m surprised you don’t when you’re running with a full server rack haha.
I always just use the proxmox data. I’ll check out grafana.
In practice right now it can be a bit schetchy tbh. Finding and subscribing to them is flakey and searching can be a bit hit and miss too.
When it does all work both smoothly and seemlessly then we’ll be golden.
Yes. Because there’s no centralised list of communities, searching is extremely difficult. Or if not, very time consuming. Following every iteration of every node.
I’m not sure how that can be overcome.
That’s cool. I’ll check it out.
The best way I can think of at the moment is a searchable website that gives you a link to click to seamlessly subscribe to them directly.
It’d be fine if the website is user submitted rather than having to interrogate all the servers on the back end, because the results would have seen a human eye and be better quality.
Actually an instance dedicated to self hosted stuff would be great. We could have communities specifically for things like home lab, media hosting (Plex, Jellyfin, Emby), unRAID, TrueNAS, shit posting, hardware discussions, general conversations, etc.
This would reduce the strain on lemmy.world and give us all a dedicated home for more niche topics without posts getting buried
Something like selfhost.edu/c/jellyfin or self.host is a great name too, if I was in the position to do it I would haha
Unfortunately, you can’t get .edu domains without being a school
Someone already owns selfho.st, wonder when they are starting up the selfhosted Lemmy instance
But aren’t there already instances that are focused on these topics, like lemmy.ml or reddthat.com?
Well those instances are general ones. I am specifically talking about an instance dedicated to self hosting with communities dedicated to topics around self hosting
we need a tool to migrate communities then, so we can create a instance about selfhosting and migrate every community there
That was the idea behind borg.chat but I was a bit late to the party :)
Also blame the reddit mods for it.
I registered/setup https://selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it to any of the current mods. They passed because their idea of “we have a lemmy community already” is pointing to lemmy.ml
I want to self-host but don’t know how to code etc so not sure where to even start
If you are wanting to self-host outside of your home-lab and use a VPS, it is pretty simple. Ubergeek77 has compiled a docker image to easily install it all in like 5 steps. Take a look, https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
#Lemmy-Easy-Deploy @ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat
Never self-hosted Lemmy, but have self-hosted other things in the past. While you don’t necessarily need to code, you need a fair amount of code-adjacent skills. If you ever want to get into self-hosting, you should have a look into (at least):
- the linux command line
- ssh
- how ports work
- VPS providers
- DNS registrars
- nginx
- docker (while you don’t need it to host things, it makes your life 10x easier)
docker (while you don’t need it to host things, it makes your life 10x easier)
…until you have a single extra space character hiding 20 lines into your
composefile and the whole thing falls over the next time you try to bring the containers up.Lint your code and configs every time!
VScode with “format on save” enabled. Literally never had an issue.
It’s the editor that finally made me move away from vim
I’ve been using vscode since it was released and I never knew that was an option. Thank you!
You’re welcome!
the linux command line
And for that, I recommend Linux Journey. They have some resources on networking too!
just created an account on @lemm.ee bc of this 🤣
Eh, I guess I’m doing my part then 🤷
This meme template NEVER gets old, lmao… Anakin’s face always gets me
Yeah… it is kinda hypocritical for this community to be based on .world, haha. There are plenty of people here running instances, who wants to volunteer as tribute and to sign up to be on call?
Well, it’s self-hosting, right. We each host our own server with our own self-hosting community. Alone. No other posters, commenters, or voters. Just each of us in isolation talking to ourselves about our hosting setup.
This is a dumb meme, there’s no such thing as self-hosting a community. A community only becomes valuable when you share it beyond the hoster, at which point it stops being self-hosted for most community-members. I believe Ruud did actually create this community, which means it is properly self-hosted as much as a successful community can be.
It is, but it’s also on a server that’s crippled by load. Each community having an instance makes sense as far as load goes.
the guy selfhosting lemmy.world, is also the guy that made this community. nothing hypocritical about that.
I’ve got business fiber, redundant networking, power, storage, and servers! With a bunch of compute sitting offline atm. Would be willing to give it a shot 🤔
Needs monitoring though.
Shameless self-insert, if you want a new instance, try mine! https://lemmings.world, it’s a general-purpose instance and everyone’s welcome!
Well, did you self host this meme?
There is always: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting 100% certified self-hosted from free-ranging servers 😅
Oh my god, I laughed so loudly that I had to explain this comic to my wife. She thought I’m dying already.
Considering how overloaded lemmy.world is right now, a pi in someone’s basement would be better, and besides, centralization is bad. Federation is what prevents lemmy from becoming the next Twitter.
I want to move to a selfhosted instance once I can migrate my account. Anyone knows if this feature will be implemented ?
I think it’s far down on their list of things to do unfortunately.
My favorite part is when it finally becomes somewhat less overloaded, and my instance gets flooded with a bunch of posts from there filling the entirety of my front page, and the second page…
Literally just left lemmy.world because of how brutally slow it’s been
Same
In terms of an optimal load spread, it’s best if the lemmiverse is split into multiple equally sized instances. If you use an instance just for yourself, it doesn’t actually decrease the load on the main servers in any way. The only thing you get is a guarantee that your instance won’t suddenly go down.
Yes, but we’re currently evolving into a situation where everything is centralized around Lemmy.world
Also the assurance that your home instance won’t be suddenly federated from one of the major ones
As long as you don’t let your instance become bot/nazi/tanky swarm, you are green…
Suddenly going down seems to be a constant in my self hosted services though…
Bow chicka bow wow
ayo gurl lemme go down on your stack
If you use an instance just for yourself, it doesn’t actually decrease the load on the main servers in any way.
That’s not completely true. Yeah, it still loads another server a bit, but the server-to-server federation traffic is much more lightweight than the client-to-server traffic that would be involved with you having an account on that server and accessing it that way.
But yeah, multiple, equally-sized communities on different instances is the ideal situation. The only sticky part right now is FOMO because you’d have to constantly watch for new SelfHosted communities and join them. Hopefully some frontend tools come along soon to make joining/managing multiple communities like that more streamlined.
Yes, ideally you‘d want to have a few large communties on each instance and not all topics with a single userbase on one. This not only decreases the load but also prevents scenarios in which a single admin starts to capsule their instance with a large userbase away from the federation.
I wanna self-host my own instance so I have more control over my data.
What kind of “control” do you mean? Your posts/comments get replicated across all the other instances. You can’t really “guarantee” a delete, since the other instances might just ignore your request for delete.
By control, I mean I can back up my data and ensure my comments, subscribed communities, messages, etc are all available to me no matter what, I don’t have to rely on some external third-party managing it for me.
I’m going to self host my own instance so I can have a cool username
You also should be concerned about other people’s data on your instance tho
My instance will be for me only, I will be the only person on it and it will be closed for registrations. I won’t be responsible for anyone else’s data on my instance, nothing for me to be concerned about.
I’m not really sure about that. I’m not saying it as an expert or anything, but that’s a discussion I saw around here the other day.
Basically, once you federate and copy the content to your instance, it is in your server and you are responsible for it.
I’ll agree with a few things, tho:
It barely happens today, on centralized platforms. They’re hardly obliged to remove content because some judge says so (it does happen, tho, at least in my country)
I’d imagine it would be a bit of a grey area legally, right now. We would need legislation regarding the fediverse. Imagine someone posts child porn in an instance yours is federated to. Your instance copies the content. You notice and defederated the whole instance, but don’t remove the content. The dude is banned by his home instance and his post is removed. But his copy still exists in yours, since you defederated before his ban and content removal.
Just saying that selfhosting brings a lot of things that need to come to your attention.
Does Lemmy automatically grab all content from all federated servers, or does it only grab the content from communities you (and any other users on the instance) are subscribed to/are actively being visited?
I’m not so sure it does copy all content in the background.
Yeah, it’s only communities that people on your instance search for/subscribe to afaik. So if you’re the only one on your instance then you have control over that.
Further to that it’s only the post objects (and comments, etc.) that is replicated all pics and videos are just URLs. even when you upload a picture with the post, that’s just uploaded to the instance and the link to it is the link of the post, even on other instances the images are fetched from the original source from the client side. I do believe each instance does local thumbnaling.
