If I self host a Lemmy instance for just myself and maybe a few friends are there any risks?

Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 163 points – 1 years ago

Looking to maybe self host my own instance, I'm still learning about the fediverse. If a different instance that I federate with hosts something illegal are there risks to me? Is anything from other instances hosted on my server like a copy of it? Or would I only end up hosting things my users post? I'm paranoid and sorry if this is a silly question.

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The activity table is also used to deduplicate incoming federation data, so instead of truncating it, I'd suggest deleting rows after a certain amount of time.

For my personal instance, I set up a cron to delete entries older than 3 days, and my db is only ~500MB with a few weeks of content! I also haven't seen any duplicated posts or comments. Even with Lemmy's retries, 3 days seems to be long enough before dropping rows from that table.

Could you share the cron/script you use to do this? I'm interested in hosting my own Lemmy at some point, and having a script for that cleanup would be hugely helpful for me.

Definitely! I'm hosting in Kubernetes so I won't post the full thing, but here's the actual command that I run hourly. Make sure to replace the values for database, username, and password.

PGPASSWORD=password psql --dbname=database --username=username --command="DELETE FROM activity WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '3 days';"

Awesome, that was just as straightforward as I was hoping it was, thanks! I am more familiar with MySQL as I haven't used Postgres a ton but SQL is SQL after all lol

You're welcome! Makes sense. They're somehow so similar yet so different lol

Hi - can you help me set this up or share the script that you use to do this? Many thanks :)

This is a great idea, thank you!

I'll have to try this later. Thanks for the tip!

Can you help me set this up also or share the script I would run to do this? Many thanks.

Sure! My script will look a little different since I'm hosting Lemmy in Kubernetes, but basically you will want to run the following command hourly. Make sure to replace the values for database, username, and password.

PGPASSWORD=password psql --dbname=database --username=username --command="DELETE FROM activity WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '3 days';"

Thank you :)

You're welcome!

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