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There's always going to be people that want to be on a smaller Instance, because it's frankly an objectively superior experience unless you get unlucky with your admin. There's really no major advantages to being on a large Instance. That I know of anyway, and I'm on one.
So, running a smaller Instance is probably always going to soak up some demand, so long as you advertise it a little bit.
One downside that I’ve run into is discovering communities. Your instance only gets updates from communities someone on that instance is subscribed to, so you’ll have to go to other instances to discover them.
My instance uses a seeder script that'll do exactly that, but automated. It'll check the most popular communities on the most popular servers and use an account to subscribe to them.
Boom, /all feed populated.
wav perfect solution
Did you guys make that script or is there a repo for it cause that would be very useful.
There are several scripts working like that. I use lcs (lemmy community seeder). I'm going to switch to something else or make my own, because lcs doesn't handle it well if an instance is overloaded or not available.
Not OP, but I’m using this one: lemmony on GitHub
EDIT: deleted link, I feel like I made a mistake, see below.
Of the 3 subscription bootstrappers listed in this thread, lemmony is by far the worst of them because it subscribes to EVERYTHING by default.
Lcs forces you to pick a number of communities to subscribe to, and the other one has default threshold heuristics that pick a limited number of active communities. Lemmony signs you up for the entire firehose of the threadiverse which both makes instances using it pretty bad fediverse citizens in terms of generating a 50x-100x the federation load of a "normal" single-user instance that subs maybe a hundred communities... and also exposes novice single-user instance owners to legal liability by subbing all the small under-moderated communities full of questionably illegal stuff.
I would recommend one of the better designed tools, and to review the resulting subscription list manually to ensure you're not signing up for some sketchy stuff.
Yeah, I let it run by night and saw what I did today. You are totally right, I will probably need to clean up a few things.
I'm not experienced at cleanup, and I don't think lemmony offers an undo. But if you used an account other than your primary... I think deleting that account will nuke its subs and you can start over. If I'm wrong, this may leave a bunch of orphaned subs with no user and no way to write an api-script to unsub.
In either case, I do recommend doing your automated subs on a different account and viewing them in all rather than directly subbing your main account to all that junk. It definitely give you more options for cleanup.
I created a bot account for this, so all green on that front, will experiment with it, thanks!
Oh cool, didn’t know that existed. I’ll look into that
You still have the same search capabilities and the same all feed though. Just not a local feed worth anything.
IMO the best communities serve a niche. Then you get a bunch of like minded members on one server and you end up with a local feed that is likely to be full of personally interesting stuff.
Yeah, for example, I'm on fosstodon and I like the local feed because it's all people talking about coding and open source software, it's nice to see the local feed even though I'm not subscribed to too many people on Mastodon
Would it make any sense to stand up my own instance, federated with what I want, follow the communities I want from other instances, and just ignore the rest? Is there any reason to not do that?
If you're happy to pay whatever it costs to host then there's no other disadvantage to this.
The only thing I can think of is if you somehow end up at odds with an admin of a big instance and they defederate your instance. Or perhaps in the future major instances decide to only federate with instances of a certain size, for some as of now unpredictable reason
Really, if your instance is just for you and your account (maybe a few friends, family), and you're not running any communities on it (all your posts and comments are on other instances), there's really no reason anyone would defed you. Unless you're a dick.
I have to think that if your very small private instance was federated with a large public instance, your instance would pull down content from the public one. That's bandwidth, and that's costing the large instance some amount of money/performance. Because your small private instance isn't "giving back" a level of content that the large instance would want or need, that could be the unpredictable reason you mentioned.
Now, I don't see that being a real issue unless there are so many low-content instances that Large Instance reviews their usage and finds out that an unacceptably high portion of their bandwidth is being used by "leeches," and wants to control cost.
I predict spam bots. It's always spam bots.
Could even run the instance from your phone or whatever device used to look at Lemmy
Has anyone done that and documented it? I know android phones are sort of linux, but still, does need some modifications.
That's what I do as of a couple days ago, it's working pretty ok so far.
What does it realistically take to host that? Would one of them smaller Digitalocean droplets be enough, for example?
I run an instance on a 2 core 4gb vps, I think the disk space will be the thing that I'll run out of
30 reg'd accounts and about 10 active users
How fast is your storage filling up with 10 active users?
about 8GB over the last 4 weeks
MIne's on a 1 core 2gb Linode, but I am also the only user.
I created mine because I am a systems engineer by trade and I moved on from Reddit. Nobody else has used my instance except for me, but I think it's worth it. I like being in control of my own account and can be assured my instance wont impose rules that i dont agree with or worse, just disappear. If other people find it useful, then that's even better.
How much storage does it take to host your own instance that’s federated with large servers? I am really curious about hosting my own instance but I don’t really understand how the storage works and don’t want my computer filled with thousands of strangers comments.
If you're the only user on your instance, your server will only know about and fetch from communities you're personally subscribed to. If there's a second user, add the communities that user is subscribed to, etc.
In the month I've been running my server, I have accumulated about 8GB of data. I've subscribed to about 30 communities or so, but my server only has be actively using it.
@bionicspud, I've been thinking of doing the same thing for the same reasons. How much storage does your instance use? I haven't looked in to how asset caching works yet. It seems like it could easily get out of hand.
Running the Instance for 3 Days now. Added multiple new Subs and cleared pictrs (but not Postgres) folder yesterday. My instance is mostly used by me.
87M ./pictrs
335M ./postgres
Edit: Small update. Original Post was posted ~9AM. Now its ~11AM
112M ./pictrs
351M ./postgres
As far as i know, images shouldn't be stored locally if not posted from the local instance. This looks to be a proxing problem as far as i understood.
what happens when you clear pictrs? you mean just deleting the folder? does that break stuff?
for comparison, my instance is only communities and no users (FAQ here: https://programming.dev/post/442419 )
it's about 5 days old but not much activity
# du -h --max-depth=2 ./
73M ./volumes/postgres
7.8M ./volumes/pictrs
8.0K ./volumes/lemmy-ui
81M ./volumes
81M ./
the latest backup is only 7.4 MB zipped, I use this backup script
#! /bin/bash
# https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html#a-sample-backup-script
now=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H.%M.%S")
cd ~/lemmy && (docker-compose exec -T postgres pg_dumpall -c -U lemmy 1> dump.sql 2> dump.errors)
cd ~/lemmy && zip -r9 ~/bak-lemmy-$now.zip ./ --exclude "volumes/postgres/*"
rm -f ~/lemmy/dump.sql
like I said though, not much activity
and here's how my backup zip files have grown in size over time
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_03.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_06.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_09.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_12.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_15.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_18.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_21.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_00.00.02.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_03.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_06.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_09.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_12.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_15.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_18.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_21.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_00.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_03.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_06.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_09.00.01.zip
6.8M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_12.00.01.zip
6.8M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_15.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_18.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_21.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_00.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_03.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_06.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_09.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_12.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_15.00.01.zip
7.4M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_18.00.01.zip
Tested deleting the pictrs/files/001 which was at that point at ~150mb. And yes, it broke stuff. For example my Avatar and a local test community logo. To "purge" it, something would need to compare it to the database i guess. My size probably comes from /c/memes 😅
I thought remote images aren't cached localy 🤔
I think it might just be thumbnails that are cached locally? And obviously your own banner and local images
Looks like random? Both images are from meme@lemmy.ml didn't post on any of these 2 threads. It would be nice to know why sometimes its get copied. https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/b2e8d1e4-b638-4d04-9710-9fa28756261d.jpeg?format=webp https://lemmy.gwa.app/pictrs/image/962b1734-d524-468c-b3f9-4d615f91f094.png?format=webp
The interesting thing is, both posts originated from .world and when opened from the original sources are also hosted the.
https://lemmy.world/post/1318708
https://lemmy.gwa.app/post/1437
That is exactly the reason why I run mine.
I like to tinker with software and thought a standing up an instance just for myself. Then you can keep your account, domain, communities, etc relatively static.
I think having various instances geographically distributed is also beneficial so popular instances can be offloaded a bit.
I run my own for myself and some friends who don't really use it. If you are interested in doing so I say give it a shot.
There are probably a lot of vlemmy refugees
