Let’s say I decided that instead of blogging, I wanted to host my own Lemmy instance that contained a maximum of one (1) user– me, but allowing other users to subscribe.

To show what I’m talking about, look at how kaidomac uses Reddit as his own personal microblog, which people subscribe to.

What is the cheapest way to do this?

My mental model of Lemmy is that if I were to do this, the instance would still be caching information from other instances. This would– at least in my mine– add up in costs.

I’m a software engineer, so feel free to use technical jargon.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 months ago

    Selfhosting is basically free. You already have an unmetered Internet connection, and sourcing some hardware to run Lemmy would also be super easy.

    The “problem” is that setting Lemmy up is quite annoying and complex and involves multiple docker containers and volumes and networks. There are various installation scripts but it is still a complete mess.

    It would also result in a metric shit-ton of traffic and data storage.

    • myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website
      0·
      2 months ago

      It would also result in a metric shit-ton of traffic and data storage.

      Really depends how many instances they want to federate with. I run a single user instance for all of my personal Lemmy use. Looks like it is using 20Gb of bandwidth per week, and the VM it runs on only has 32Gb of storage (and it runs other services, too)

        • myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website
          0·
          2 months ago

          I used the Lemmy Ansible method to deploy. At the time that I first installed it, it was the recommended method vs a docker compose. It is a little bit of setup, but is pretty simple to get going. Just follow the instructions and it should just work.

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
            0·
            2 months ago

            If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your level of IT expertise?

            Have you administered servers, used ansible, etc?

            • myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website
              0·
              2 months ago

              I’m a software dev with quite a lot of experience in server admin. I’m also a full time Linux user, and run a lot of services both at home and on a rented VPS. I had oddly enough never used Ansible before, but the instructions on that GitHub page should make it pretty simple.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
      0·
      2 months ago

      The problem for me is I believe you need to open your network firewall for Lemmy and other federated services to work right?

      Not really a fan of opening up more attack surface on my home network

        • flashgnash@lemm.ee
          0·
          2 months ago

          Is that not essentially the same issue as opening your firewall though? You’re still taking requests from outside your network into your network without any authentication until they actually hit the server

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 months ago

        The problem for me is I believe you need to open your network firewall for Lemmy and other federated services to work right?

        Yes, of course. Or search for an external reverse proxy. Cloudflare offers something like this. (You set a Cloudflare server IP as target for your domain and then tell Cloudflare your IP and all traffic is routed over the Cloudflare ecosystem so your actual IP is not publicly used.)

        I just opened port 443 and forwarded it to my Docker host and have NPM running there, handling all the forwarding to the individual containers, based on the request, but due to my day job I know what I’m doing :)

        • flashgnash@lemm.ee
          0·
          2 months ago

          I would still always be worried it’d been silently bot netted or something if it’s accessible, even through cloudflare

          I guess cloudflare does a lot to stop attacks from bots though right?

          • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
            0·
            2 months ago

            I never tried it personally but I assume you’re pretty save.

            Here’s how it works:

            The Tunnel daemon creates an encrypted tunnel between your origin web server and Cloudflare’s nearest data center, all without opening any public inbound ports.

            After locking down all origin server ports and protocols using your firewall, any requests on HTTP/S ports are dropped, including volumetric DDoS attacks. Data breach attempts — such as snooping of data in transit or brute force login attacks — are blocked entirely.

            https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/

    • Toribor@corndog.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Lemmy is definitely the most pain in the ass service that I self host. Most annoyingly when something goes wrong I can’t just go on Lemmy until I feel like fixing it.

    • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      2 months ago

      I’m not sure how much you’re willing to write off as “basically free”, but electricity does add up for running your own server.

        • toastal@lemmy.ml
          0·
          2 months ago

          If you were worried about saving energy, you would be running an XMPP server over Matrix. Matrix has similarly expensive requirements as Lemmy but Prosody or ejabberd can hum in the background.

        • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          My Plex/*arr Intel NUC server uses like 50-75W under heavy load and maybe 5W at idle, and I can’t imagine it’s not powerful enough to run a small Lemmy instance, so even this figure seems a little high to me.

          • myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website
            0·
            2 months ago

            Same, but even lower (Beelink N95). My whole stack of two NAS units, mini PC, switch, router, and modem average a load of 50 watts.

            • Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              0·
              2 months ago

              Uhh… maybe putting a 9700k in my server wasnt as good of an idea as i thought it to be… it eats 74watts in idle… uhhh…

              • myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website
                0·
                2 months ago

                Yeahhhh…

                Obviously it can all depend on your requirements, but this N95 system has been pretty eye opening on how much people are over-speccing their builds for home server use. It has 8Gb of memory in it, but I seldom see it use more than 2. The box is doing DNS, Jellyfin, torrenting, VPN, private git, etc.

        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
          0·
          2 months ago

          … for a small web server.

          It’s not just a small web server. It’s a dedicated server with full root access and 24/7 direct hardware access without any extra costs.

      • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
        0·
        2 months ago

        It depends on how powerful of a machine you need. My server only costs about $9.25/mo to run and it is way overpowered for the services I run on it.