I’m a nerd but not to the point I’m ready to install my own servers.
Is there a way for folks like me to set up and run a Lemmy, or is that reserved for the technical experts?
On the old site, I think one of the unspoken benefits was that anyone could create and run a sun
some instances let anyone create their own community (lemmy equivalent of subreddit)
I’d recommend tech experience before setting up your own lemmy server ( instance); the internet is a hostile place with random pcs poking servers 24/7
Thank you, I guess I’ll need to look for an instance that lets people set up their own communities
Any recommendations?
It looks like you’re on lemmy.world. That instance let’s you create communities. If you’re viewing the site in your browser, tap the hamburger menu on the top right (3 horizontal lines) and select “Create Community”.
I’ll recommend my own instance at endlesstalk.org. There you can create a community, if you want. lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works might also allow creating of new communities, but I haven’t checked.
Hey. I did this, I self host a lot of stuff and at some point it just became my default setting. In this case though I dont think its really that valuable unless you’re planning on hosting your own communities and moderate users and whatnot which comes with its own admin burden. Not to deter you or anything. I used a modified docker compose, so you’d need some way to host lemmy, lemmy’s UI server and a database backend, and a reverse proxy in front… DNS and SSL certificates… Its kinda intermediate to highly technical to host your own I guess? Would I recommend it to someone not technical? No, unless you were really keen and looking for a project to expand your skills a bit. 😉
I’m trying to do exactly this (docker, nginx, SSL) and I’m having a hard time (everything works except the nginx <=> lemmy-ui 🥵).
I’m not an expert though, so I have to “learn” every brick here :-) interesting!
Thanks! Yea, that’s all beyond me
I’m certain you could figure it out if you’re interested, but IMO there’s not much benefit to individual users running instances unless you want to gather a community.
What about letting people gather a community (on your server)?
I mean the big instances will be “full” one day no? I love the decentralisation part of Lemmy too so that is partly why I’m trying to get a small server up and running.
Nah, big instances don’t get full, they get just get bigger.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from self hosting. It’s absolutely within anyone’s reach and could be a very rewarding pursuit. I would 100% encourage anyone to learn about self hosting in general. I also do not mean to imply that you or anyone else doesn’t have what it takes.
That said, I’ve found my own self hosting efforts to be a little bit like a new puppy. It’s a big commitment and once the shine wears off it might be more of a responsibility than you bargained for. In my experience things do go wrong unexpectedly. When others are depending on you, you can find yourself in a situation where you have to put your life on hold for several hours trying to figure out what’s gone wrong.
So in summary, it would be a cool thing to do but too much of a commitment for me.
With full I meant the hardware is maxed out (or bandwidth).
I haven’t yet really figured out how it all works, complexity-wise.
Yeah, I don’t really know for sure but I don’t think that’s a significant risk at present. IDK anything about lemmy’s architecture specifically but I would be surprised if even a large instance like world is approaching a hard limit.
Cost will become a factor but even 1 in 1000 users donating $5 a month is probably enough to have a surplus.
Setting up an own instance of Lemmy got super easy using Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
I’m using Dynu for DDNS.
Thank you, but I hope you can understand that these steps are still very technical for someone who doesn’t do this work otherwise
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Install Docker if you don’t already have it
https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/#server
Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
Change into the directory
cd ./Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
Check out the latest tag
git checkout $(git describe --tags
git rev-list --tags --max-count=1
)Copy config.env.example to config.env
cp ./config.env.example ./config.env
Make sure the DNS records for your domain point to your server
Edit the config.env file, and at minimum, change LEMMY_HOSTNAME to be your domain. Then…
Deploy!
./deploy.sh