Well well 🀨

Wats0ns@sh.itjust.works to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 1338 points –
127

Isn't selfhosted started by the same dude that started lemmy.world? Meaning it really is selfhosted? πŸ€”

Stop pointing shit out and grab your bean fork, we're rioting!

I have to be careful and ration my bean memes.

That plate looks like it's viewed from the bottom (like it's glued to the ceiling). Trippy.

Ok, back to meme school for you

Yeah, the format is that she repeats the second panel on the fourth panel, with more question marks and concern. This version is almost like explaining the joke here.

Lmao you beat me to pointing that out, he totally butchered the template

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

Something like selfhost.edu/c/jellyfin or self.host is a great name too, if I was in the position to do it I would haha

Unfortunately, you can't get .edu domains without being a school

Someone already owns selfho.st, wonder when they are starting up the selfhosted Lemmy instance

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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.

My favorite part is when it finally becomes somewhat less overloaded, and my instance gets flooded with a bunch of posts from there filling the entirety of my front page, and the second page...

I want to move to a selfhosted instance once I can migrate my account. Anyone knows if this feature will be implemented ?

I think it's far down on their list of things to do unfortunately.

Well, did you self host this meme?

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.

Inside the home even.

Can't get hacked if all your services are down because you can't get those cocksuckingmothershitbitchingassbastard routing tables right 🀯

The connection is coming from INSIDE THE house INSTANCE!

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)

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?

Same here.

A tasker script automatically connects my phone to the Wireguard tunnel as soon as I disconnect from my home WiFi too, so I always have access to my services. It's seamless, if I'm streaming music from Airsonic to my phone, and jump on my bike and take off, I don't even skip a beat on playback.

Ah the magic of buffers.

Yep, and it's also nice to have that buffer when I ride through a few dead zones where I drop data for like 5-10 minutes but I set Ultrasonic to preload/cache 8 songs so it doesn't disrupt playback then either.

Do you trust yourself to sustain this considerable commitment?

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 β€œwhich community has the Most Users”

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

Why is that worrying?

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

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.

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.

We did it reddit err... sorry guys... old habits and all

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).

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

Understood. I don’t know how the devs intend to overcome that challenge. If if it’s even a realistic goal. I just know it gets discussed often.

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

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.

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.

Yes. Because there’s no centralised list of communities, searching is extremely difficult. Or if not, very time consuming. Following every iteration of every node.

I’m not sure how that can be overcome.

The best way I can think of at the moment is a searchable website that gives you a link to click to seamlessly subscribe to them directly.

It'd be fine if the website is user submitted rather than having to interrogate all the servers on the back end, because the results would have seen a human eye and be better quality.

Yeh. I think there are websites that do that already. I haven’t really looked. But has to be some form of centralised list.

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 β€œall”.

Sorry. Was a typo. Says can join* any community and it show up on the feed. They need to join first. Yeas.

One person on your instance needs to join for the community to appear. That is the major benefit of joining a large instance, you don't need to search other instances or use 3rd party tools to find new communities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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This meme template NEVER gets old, lmao.... Anakin's face always gets me

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

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)

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!

VScode with "format on save" enabled. Literally never had an issue.

It's the editor that finally made me move away from vim

I've been using vscode since it was released and I never knew that was an option. Thank you!

Xml wasn't great but yaml is 2 steps backwards

Edit: tfw 3months ago

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

Yeah... it is kinda hypocritical for this community to be based on .world, haha. There are plenty of people here running instances, who wants to volunteer as tribute and to sign up to be on call?

Well, it's self-hosting, right. We each host our own server with our own self-hosting community. Alone. No other posters, commenters, or voters. Just each of us in isolation talking to ourselves about our hosting setup.

This is a dumb meme, there's no such thing as self-hosting a community. A community only becomes valuable when you share it beyond the hoster, at which point it stops being self-hosted for most community-members. I believe Ruud did actually create this community, which means it is properly self-hosted as much as a successful community can be.

It is, but it's also on a server that's crippled by load. Each community having an instance makes sense as far as load goes.

the guy selfhosting lemmy.world, is also the guy that made this community. nothing hypocritical about that.

I've got business fiber, redundant networking, power, storage, and servers! With a bunch of compute sitting offline atm. Would be willing to give it a shot πŸ€”

Needs monitoring though.

If you self host a community how would anyone find it?

post it in New Communities and also it should show in Lemmy Explorer

Now it's full of people who aren't hosting it and it's not self-hosted for them anymore.

The idea of a self-hosted community is meaningless. It has to attract people other than the hoster to be useful.

Also blame the reddit mods for it.

I registered/setup https://selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it to any of the current mods. They passed because their idea of "we have a lemmy community already" is pointing to lemmy.ml