is there an easy way for non-technical experts to set up their own Lemmy

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 46 points – 1 years ago

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

I'll second this for the most part. Once you get the basic framework of a docker host set up it's pretty simple with only a couple containers holding it up so if you can understand the workings of virtual machines/containers it's pretty 'easy' to set up. That said, an ugly XSS vulnerability has been out there causing problems and as a whole it's very much an unpolished product so there's a lot of work in understanding 'why the heck is it doing this now??' things.

Thank you, I guess I’ll need to look for an instance that lets people set up their own communities

Any recommendations?

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.

Thanks, I’ll check it out!

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”.

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.

I would say the benefits are control of downtime. Hosting your own instance makes you responsible for your maintenance. If you maintain your own and federate with other instances, you still have an experience if another instance goes down, you just wont see that particular content. If you use someone elses instance as your "home" instance and it goes down, your account goes down with it.

The only points of potential issues with self hosting are if the activitypub protocol itself goes down, or something to do with your own instance such as going down itself or becoming defederated.

Perhaps for someone with experience.

There are innumerable "potential issues" for someone with no experience.

Of course. This would fall under the "responsible for your own maintenance" part.

Im not saying its suitable for everyone, just pointing out the benefits if self hosting

Thank you

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.