I am fairly new to Lemmy and was thinking of getting an account on one of the “big” servers to get the full experience, but then I figured I could do exactly the same thing as with my GoToSocial and other services: run my own instance.
I am wondering if this is an overkill or not. Any experience running your own small Lemmy instance? Are there better options that are compatible with Lemmy but lighter to run for this purpose?
Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)
But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.
I will have to take another look. I’ve seen it before but didn’t see anything about Lemmy and such.
This is like the opposite of what you want to do for complex software - don’t add more abstraction, or you won’t know what to do when stuff goes wrong!
YuNoHost is a great alternative, but if you really want to learn, I would instead recommend really spending some time learning Docker; you don’t have to understand how to build your own images (although that is also very useful), but mostly what is going on at a high level, and then switch to Docker Compose. These days it is extremely easy to run very complex architectures with a single compose file.
You also don’t need to make it public for your tests, you can always start with local ip addresses and you own computer, or if you have a small computer that can run headless, then you can setup your experiments in there.