• ThatGuyFromWork@lemm.eeEnglish
    116·
    1 year ago

    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

  • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    634·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • SomeOtherUsername@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    42·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
      30·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Strive7307@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • andreluis034@lm.put.tfEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.oneEnglish
          14·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.oneEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • RomanRoy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • ipkpjersi@lemmy.oneEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • obosob@feddit.ukEnglish
                3·
                1 year ago

                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.

    • Wats0ns@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      24·
      1 year ago

      Yes, but we’re currently evolving into a situation where everything is centralized around Lemmy.world

    • J_C___@lemmy.placeEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Also the assurance that your home instance won’t be suddenly federated from one of the major ones

      • s4if@lemmy.my.idEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        As long as you don’t let your instance become bot/nazi/tanky swarm, you are green…

  • abraham_linksys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    351·
    1 year ago

    I laughed but I dunno about you guys but I don’t publicly self host anything. If you can’t auth via ssh or VPN then you’re not accessing a damn thing from my home network. I’ve got multiple routers that I could set up some isolation with but it’s just too close to home.

    • XTornado@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Me having everything open: Come here mother***s I am waiting for all of you.

      VPNs? Cloudfare? Cloudfare Tunnels? Tailscale? What’s all that? Here we are fighters not pus***s.

      (Just kidding about the previos comments haha, well I have it open but it’s not on my home network… so slightly less problematic and tbh I am planning on closing some stuff, plus all is behind logins, and tbh I kind of like to be able to access to it from anywhere/any computer without having to use any special connection)

      • kitrune@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Well, now I’m worried about my security. I have an ngrok tunnel running inside a container on a raspberry pi. Do I need to worry about my other devices or if someone tries to attack me only the container is affected?

  • LachlanUnchained@lemmyunchained.netEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

    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”

    • Wats0ns@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      Yes they can be on any instance, but I’m starting to get worried about the number of communities that are on Lemmy.world

        • MacFearrs@vlemmy.netEnglish
          101·
          1 year ago

          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

          • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
            8·
            1 year ago

            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.

          • LachlanUnchained@lemmyunchained.netEnglish
            21·
            1 year ago

            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.

        • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          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).

          • LachlanUnchained@lemmyunchained.netEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
              4·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • LachlanUnchained@lemmyunchained.netEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                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.

                • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
                  4·
                  1 year ago

                  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 GET request with the proper Accept header and you will get the latest version of that Object. AFAIK there is no provision for IDs to change.

              • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                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 ;)

        • 0xc0ba17@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          When lemmy.world will disappear, that’ll be a lot of communities (and valuable information) that go with it.

          • LachlanUnchained@lemmyunchained.netEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            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.

    • 🦥󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • 4orty4@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      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”.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • LachlanUnchained@lemmyunchained.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • pyrojoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • LachlanUnchained@lemmyunchained.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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)

        • pyrojoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • LachlanUnchained@lemmyunchained.netEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • pyrojoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              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.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • LessQuit@feddit.nuEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    I want to self-host but don’t know how to code etc so not sure where to even start

    • mim@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      25·
      1 year ago

      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)
      • tool@r.rosettast0ned.comEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        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 compose file and the whole thing falls over the next time you try to bring the containers up.

        Lint your code and configs every time!

  • ALERT@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    114·
    1 year ago

    Oh my god, I laughed so loudly that I had to explain this comic to my wife. She thought I’m dying already.