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?
I run a single user instance and it’s horribly slow. Mostly because I only have HDDs and not enough RAM to compensate. I hope Lemmy 1.0 will increase database performance.
Piefed is supposedly much more performant. But I’m shying away from migrating because I don’t want to lose my post history and uploaded pictures.
Maybe there’s a way to import contents through federation? Just, if both run on the same hardware when doing it (possibly the new instance on a subdomain), both would run way slower.
Canceling all subscriptions would probably make Lemmy use almost no resources.
I run dullsters.net which is sort of a single user instance. Nobody else can make accounts it’s strictly for one community.
Hi, single user lemmy instance here. I’d say it’s been smooth sailing for now. I might consider moving to piefed like other folks here, but I’ll keep it and see. Right now i can’t even upgrade due to arm64 docker images are broken at the moment, but it’s sufficient enough.
EDIT: Seems like it’s fixed, yippee :D https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6201#issuecomment-3693373333 kudos to mattlqx :)
How much storage is it using?
~3GB according to postgres, ~545MB for the pictures. Not too bad actually.
That’s pretty good!
So, what is/are the advantage(s) of running a single user Lemmy instance? Privacy? Security? Anonymity? Curious since it seems there are people who do.
Immunity to defederation drama
Honestly, privacy and security. I can purposefully disable registration, I have my own data purposefully and anonymity, plus eliminating trusting a third-party server admins, etc.
I’ve thought of doing it for privacy and other reasons. I don’t have the sense that the resource load is high, but I haven’t checked carefully.
Running “my” own single user instance here.
Great! Love it! The whole idea.
For how long and how do resource usage and storage space used look by now?
Disk space 10gb, CPU/ram not noticeable on my server (lots of other services using more than Lemmy).
I think it’s been up about one year. One user but I subscribe to all communities I find remotely interesting.
Thanks for the reply. So what kind of magnitude are we talking on the RAM usage here? Some people here talked about not being able to fit it inside 2G total. So I assume it’s probably like hundreds of megs which is only really significant in such low memory configurations.
My server has 48gb ram and in top Lemmy doesn’t appear even in the 0.1% memory usage.
I did it for a while but I had loads of annoying lags in updates, guess you had to roam around to get things going, maybe it’s all okay now, IDK. If it’s just for surfing I don’t see any reason to do it, otherwise it was a fun experiment.
I’m hosting the Decronym bot on a single-user instance, and it’s a real pain. The bot’s been down for weeks, actually, because an upgrade failed with some obscure error around the database schema…
I’ve ended up just today, wiping the whole thing and starting over, losing all data and having to refederate the bot. So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend.
[Acronyms to help the bot re-establish: LVM, HASS, k8s]
As others have already said, piefed is much lighter than lemmy, and is what I’m running as well, my instance isn’t necessarily single-user, (anyone’s free to join), but there’s only one other user on my instance
yeeeeaaaahhhhh boiiiiii
And there they are!
Also might be worth thinking about what else you are self hosting. Don’t want to self host all of your communication apps; that would be brittle.
I run a more-or-less single user instance. It’s fine. Not the fastest page-loads but otherwise NBD.
My instance runs great… I’ve got it on NVME drives and a system with 64GB of RAM. When I was hosting it on Digital Ocean, I often ran into performance issues with RAM (I think I just had 2GB). Since the switch it’s been rock solid.
I am running them on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM and a 2TB NVMe SSD. Loving it.
And now running both Lemmy and PieFed side by side (OP, posting from my PieFed account).
I think admin wise I am going to stick with PieFed. Definitely liking it more!
Another single-user Piefed guy weighing in. Do it.
Having to run a full-blown PostgreSQL instance just for a single user is a show-stopper for me.
PostgreSQL
fuckin gross!
PostgreSQL is a goated database. It’s rock solid.
No clue why you’d find it gross. I’ll take it over MySQL, OracleDB or MariaDB any day.
I don’t really worry too much about running multiple DBs; all the apps I am currently running are dockerized. As far as I can run everything I need for an app can run as a container, I am good. For apps like these, they run in their own network and only the main entry point is visible to the interwebs via private tunnel.
Have run Lemmy and now Piefed, it’s nice to have things customized to your wants, but probably wouldn’t bother if it was setting up a host just for that.
