Lemmy is like a public library of the internet: it's one of the few places where you can exist without the expectation of paying either through watching ads or through direct payments

snek_boi@lemmy.ml to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 688 points –
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What does it cost to host a lemmy? Is that something you could self host?

Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough, sans the image store. But it's not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.

Lemmy's issue is that it's non-trivial to deploy and oftentimes painful to upgrade.

But it’s not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.

Doesn't lemmy sync posts, comments, and pictures with other instances? I remember after a CP attack some instances manually turned it off in the code to avoid troubles, and also had to clear their storage.

It absolutely does. Think of lemmy like of email – your mail server has all the email you received.

Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough

Not including the time cost to manage it.

That's exactly my point, though.

I was trying to say that the hardware cost to host it may not be expensive, but the management cost could be quite costly.

Yeah something like the CX22 https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ which is € 4.51 / month is enough for lemmy.

What I do instead is I host a series of services on my VPS and I pay about 20 EUR/month

  • Lemmy
  • Mastodon
  • PeerTube
  • my ruby on rails website + blog
  • my old PHP website + blog
  • another old PHP blog
  • my sisters PHP website
  • my sisters static website
  • Firefox Sync server
  • my bands static website
  • a matrix server with some bridges
  • a syncthing instance
  • a TTRSS instance
  • another static website

and I probably forgot some things.

Love this! Did you start out on the Fediverse or did you start on another and then move to your own?

I ask because I've been considering hosting my own for the family. I already have a server.

The thing holding me back is I've gotten my Mastodon and Lemmy accounts really nice with content and it's daunting to think of moving/remaking accounts.

Yeah, both with Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy I started on my own instances. Actually not quite, I had an Mastadon account for a day somewhere before I decided that I want to use it for real and installed my own instance.

My instance (about 2-5 active users) has a running cost of about $8 NZ, on a small VPS.