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. 😊
I 100% agree with you, thank you all
People used to make their own sites and dedicated forum boards where the norm. With the mess of old hardware floating about, the overall lowering of bandwidth costs, more options being made available and simpler to deploy, and storage in the TBs coming down on price the population is bound to make things personal again one way or another. Being just another profile on some big platform doesn’t have the ‘me’ mark to it that putting your own together does. Have fun with it, break things and make them better, always a new idea to be had.
Unfortunately no old cloud servers or switches on ebay. As such availability of used hardware is more limited in future.
you dont even need big old iron. I run all my containers etc on old business sff pcs and storage on synology. works great
I’m weird, so I have 10G/40G networking and half a rack that would burn 10 kW when all fired up. My major cost issue is power, which is currently 0.7 EUR/kWh though capped at 0.4 EUR/kWh for a while. I could use some more modern hardware but it’s no longer bountiful and cheap.
@eleitl that’s so expensive. Where do you live?
It’s Germany. Regular rates are some 0.3 EUR/kWh at the moment, I hope to be there by May next year. Meanwhile, I currently make some half of my net power with photovoltaics. It helps to keep the costs down.
That is insanely expensive electricity
I agree. Which is why I only run a firewall on a thin client, a low-power 8-core Atom C2758 Proxmox with SSDs and an external HDD and a fanless switch, all for about 70 W total 24/7/365. Any other server is one of the 120 W, 300 W or 500 W kind. These do add up.
Maybe solar can help offsets the power cost? With enough sun and big enough panels, even without batteries you might run your servers for free if your electric company gives you credit for unused solar power during the day.
I’m actually making about 6 kWh/day from photovoltaics since mid-April averaged, which is about half my last year’s total electric energy consumed. I might be able to boost that to 8 kWh/day later this year. This is all while running very little infrastructure, for cost reasons.
oldskool, for something like this you can throw an old nuc on the network
multiple cores is the norm even on budget hardware so a surprising amount of cheap hardware is quite capable.
highly recommend looking into 1L systems. I moved in this direction after realizing i was headed down the same path as you.
Actually, these are mostly dual-socket boxes with lots of cores, ECC RAM and lots of 3.5", 2.5" spindles and SSDs, plus private storage networks, and such.
Instead of a NUC I run a 1U Supermicro 8-core Atom C2758 with 16 GB RAM and SSDs which is quite durable but will die eventually. With more modern hardware I meant something like that, only with onboard 10G and/or 50G (SFP+/SFP28/SFP56) with more and better cores as well as onboard NVMe along with frontal SAS/SATA slots. And of course some larger SSDs to populate these.
There’s normally a lot of used servers on ebay, anything in particular you’re looking for?
I’ve had issues finding 10g switches on ebay, but I know I’ve seen some older enterprisey switches
Just need to find the right sites. A couple places I’ve gone that seem to pick up a bunch of corporate PLM gear and refurb it are here:
I know about Servermonkey, and the prices there aren’t nice at all. I’m rather sticking with old servers with roughly the same specs, but perhaps twice the wattage and noise, which only run occasionally. The 24/7 stuff is already on a low-power footprint, though I don’t have a successor for that little Supermicro when it bites the dust. I’d rather pay way less than 1 kEUR for it.
I more stay with the other one for purchases, but if nothing else I like SM for their filters/build pages. I used to specifically try and build small and low power, but eventually it became simpler and more efficient to put everything on a couple big boxes and share resources rather than having a bunch of low power dedicated boxes. Does tend to make the office warm though with nearly 1Kw running the stack.
1 kW would cost me some 17 EUR/day. Or over 6100 EUR per year.
As an old fart it pretty cool to see some moving back to how things were. Smaller more personal spaces run by people instead of corporations.
Fellow old fart. I remember having to call my buddy so he could hook his family’s phone line to his bbs before I’d dial in. I remember standing up a web server in the days where you could find all the new sites on a page at NCSA or CERN. When there was a literal directory of the WWW.
The corps definitely made it easier to get out there, and thank god for online shopping, but the dream of connecting with random people on the other side of the world never had banner ads or unskippable video propaganda.
I really thought that I was NOT old fart… but since I remember lowering coax (not LAN) cable to my buddy one floor below over the window to play AOE… I guess I am :)
Hehe. One of my first tasks as a student worker was dragging coax through the department’s dropped ceilings, upgrading their network from Apple’s “Localtalk” to 10-base-2, because the university hadn’t gotten its own internal networking sorted out. There was ZERO security - anyone who could plug in could send print jobs to the President’s office - access controls didn’t exist. In retrospect, daisy-chain is a really dumb network architecture, but coax was cheaper than cat-5, the total length of cable was way shorter, and you didn’t have to buy any kind of fancy network switch.
Magical times. I learned so much, without it feeling like learning at all, and it was so exciting I never needed a repeat lesson. I could probably still find the resistor you have to cut on a Mac+ motherboard to upgrade RAM, but I have to look up the syntax every time I want to create a new SQL table. Makes me wonder what kids today are putting together for similar experience. Selfhosting seems close, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world where my grandma (or, I suppose, by that time, I ) pick up a Lemmy-box from BestBuy, slot it into the router, and join the federation.
Ugh. Running coax and transceiver taps to old banyan vines networks. Nightmare fuel
Oh wow, thanks for your perspective!
Regarding your last point: My chinese-made e-scooter can’t be readily used right after you buy it. You have to:
- download the app
- register an account
- sign away your soul and firstborn in the privacy and TOS agreement
- Watch a several minute long & UNSKIPPABLE intro video
- Finally unlock/activate your scooter
Especially the video felt super dystopian. As if I were not a conscious person, but an asset that needed training.
Yea I ran a c64 bbs the went wwiv multiline. god the upgrade from 300baud to 14.4k or 19.2 felt like lightspeed…God im old
Is robotics 19.2 was awesome to see pages of text load at a time vs scrolling in at 300baud. Telex was wild.
Hi from another part of the Internet hosted in a basement somewhere in Northern Europe running a different piece of software :-)
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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.
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.
for something small and personal, trivial if you can handle a bit of linuxfu
youll spend less dollars on this than twitter.
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I’m going to rent another server later today and run my own instance as well, I’m so thrilled 🥹
Seeing this community made me try Linux once more and learn more about hosting.
Installing Mint sucked since my computer was not apparently going to BIOS, as it was not displayed ob my monitor until I plugged a second monitor through the Displayport
