It's all about how many communities your user(s) subscribe to since your instance basically acts as a mirror for those.

My instance has been running for 23 days, and I am pretty much the only active local user:

7.3G    pictrs
5.3G    postgres

edit: I may have a slight Reddit Lemmy problem

Mastodon has a system of user-definable Content Warnings that hide the rest of the post and any media attached. Due to just how broad NSFW can be something like this may be a good idea. Maybe you're ok with nudity, but not porn. Maybe you're ok with porn but not (certain act/fetish/whatever). Maybe you're ok with violence, but not dead bodies. Lots to think about there. Defining all of these in advance or trying to come up with categories such that it is actually useful to everyone sounds like a path to madness and fetishes you never even knew existed.

These can also be used for things that aren't necessarily NSFW, but also uncomfortable topics such as "miscarriage", "cheating", or even just "spoilers for <show>". They're pretty versatile.

I expect the moderators of communities to do sufficient policing of their community to make sure it follows the rules of the instance it is on and the rules of that community. If those rules permit something you disagree with (or don't permit something you do want to see) the power is in your hands as a user to not participate or even see that community. The only way for a user to guarantee they won't interact with someone from instance X (whether that is exploding-heads or lemmygrad or whatever you don't like) is to only interact with communities on instances that have them defederated. There are places you can get a more curated and aggressively moderated experience, and have been recommending places such as beehaw to anyone looking for that.

I will take action against:

• Local users harassing someone
• Local users breaking local rules
• Local users repeatedly breaking remote rules
• Local communities that break local instance rules
• Remote users harassing local users
• Remote users repeatedly breaking local rules
• Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to break local rules
• Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to harass my users

The first rule on my instance is a catch-all "Be welcoming", that will be wielded to aggressively remove far more than just "racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia".

As an admin I don't have the time or desire to police:

• Local users interacting on remote communities, so long as they are following remote rules
• Remote communities
• Remote users interacting with remote users/communities

I do hope for a way to better curate (or just disable for now) the "All" feed, at the very least for anyone who isn't logged in. Given the general rules above that feed may include disagreeable posts, and is not a good representation of my instance or the type of community most users there will experience.

For communities or users many clients (including the default web ui) understand relative links, like [!asklemmy@lemmy.ml](/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml) or [@tymon@lemm.ee](/u/tymon@lemm.ee). The problem with these is that if instance the person reading your messages is on doesn't know that user/community (because no one is locally subscribed to it or there have been no actions seen by that user) you will get an ugly 404 page with the only remedy being to perform a search for that unknown user/community/whatever manually. I think this issue is being worked on to make things more seamless, but IDK when this experience will be improved.

There is also technically no guarantee that any instance will keep track of non-local objects perpetually, so the "canonical" location of a thing is generally on the server that the user is based on. Posts and comments are referenced by a sequential ID that is different on every instance, so... yeah.

Technically there is a unique ID for every object sent through ActivityPub, so those may be linkable in the future with a similar scheme such as /post/288327@lemm.ee or something uglier like /post/https%3A%2F%2Flemm.ee%2Fpost%2F288327 depending on compatibility needs (as the IDs in ActivityPub are all full URLs to the source object)

Yep, nobody is talking about it at all...

• https://prime8s.xyz/post/3812
• https://lemmy.ml/post/1409164
• https://lemmy.one/post/337062
• https://lemmy.world/post/1079916
• https://lemmy.world/post/1060627
• https://lemmy.one/post/629353

Just run your own instance, I say.... that way it's your fault when you forget to renew the domain name instead of the poor soul running vlemmy.

That's the best part, it doesn't!

You're spot on, donations, or just people (like me) doing it out of the goodness of their heart for various reasons (free speech, desire for control/power, curiosity, boredom, lust for gold, being born with a heart full of neutrality, etc).

My server is mostly intended for me, but anyone who wants an account is welcome. My reasons are that I already run stuff on servers I have so cost is minimal vs what I would be doing anyway, I like having control over things I run (password manager, git server, etc), and based on some of the federation drama I saw in Mastodon (and has already happened here with beehaw) it's a good idea to run your own server.

Basically, no:

It can cause some wackiness… basically you will need to maintain that old domain forever and everything will still refer to that old domain.

For example, your post looks like this from an ActivityPub/federation perspective:

{
    [...]
    "id": "https://atosoul.zapto.org/post/24325",
    "attributedTo": "https://atosoul.zapto.org/u/Soullioness",
    [...]
    "content": "<p>I'm curious if I can migrate my instance (a single user) to a different domain? Right now I'm on a free DNS from no-ip but I might get a prettier paid domain name sometime.</p>\n",
}

The post itself has an ID that references your domain, and the the attributedTo points to your user which also references your domain. AFAIK there is no reasonable way to update/change this. IDs are forever.

It would also break all of the subscriptions for an existing instance, as the subscriptions are all set to deliver to that old domain.

IMO your best bet would be to start a new instance on the new domain, update your profile on the old one saying that your user is now @Soullioness@newinstance.whatever and maintain that old server in a read-only manner for as long as you can bear.

Bill Wurtz's history of the entire world, i guess and its predecessor history of japan. They both blur the line of "documentary" a little, but are very good, and his music (beyond those videos) is also great.

Most any of Qxir's or Plainly Difficult's videos.

I could probably go on, but my nerd is showing maybe a little too much, and I watch way too much youtube.

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin several years ago and haven't really looked back. Overall I just didn't like the direction plex kept going (pushing shit streaming services, central auth, paywalling features), and dropped it even though I grabbed a lifetime plex pass back in the day. The only thing I miss about plex was the ease of developing a custom plugin for it since you could pretty much just drop python scripts in there and have it work, though their documentation for plugin development was terrible (and I think removed from their site entirely).

The game has gotten continuous updates increasing the scope, mod-ability, stability (to an absurd degree, even cross play between Switch and PC), target new platforms (it runs on Apple silicon natively now and they did a whole bunch of work to make it work well on steam deck), etc. of the game for those same 3 years. Yes, they did come out of early access, but their approach to the game hasn't changed significantly and it continued to get better with time.

They could have called this game done way earlier and released the work they've done since as DLC, but they didn't. Instead they have massively increased the value in the game over nearly 7 years since initial early access release at $20 and have since raised the price a total of 75% to reflect this. They even gave advance notice of the both price increases.

Wube is still working on the next release of the base game, and are also working on an expansion they say will be as big as the base game. Perhaps your argument against price increases holds sway as the expansion isn't being added to the base game, instead it will be $30 (or maybe $35 given the base game increase).

I have played this game far longer than any other, and keep coming back to it when it updates or for new modpacks which completely change the experience. I would gladly pay $35 for what is in the game right now. I can understand if the game isn't for you or the price increase turns you off, you don't have buy it. In fact, unless you can afford to not sleep for the next 3 days you shouldn't, as the factory must grow and you are running low on iron.

I mean, people had "alt" and "throwaway" accounts on that other site for just such occasions. Not sure how good support for account switching is in any of the apps. It would also be an opportunity to explore another instance if you wanted (especially if your instance bans/restricts such things).

Be the change you want to see. Setting up an instance is surprisingly easy, it's the admin stuff that will take much more time, and finding users that will probably be hard. Also scaling once you hit a certain level of size/traffic, but that'd be a good problem to have. To me the most beautiful part of the fediverse is that if you're not finding the instance with rules/defederation/etc you want you can make that place exist.

If you are interested in doing so I'd be more than happy to give what advice or help I can.

Yeah, and I purposely subscribe to (or sometimes have a dedicated "federation helper bot" account I run subscribe to) most of the most popular communities on the most popular instances so I can get a decent sampling of what's going on in the fediverse on the "All" feed. So I assume my storage usage is maybe a bit higher than what an "average" single-user instance may be...

Sorry, but I don't see how blocking an instance solves the inability of people to tag sensitive but non-NSFW content and the inability to explain why the content could be considered NSFW. Could you explain your thought a bit more?

They have been tuning the algorithm for that in the past releases, so may be related to that. Also, there is/was a bug where if you don't restart lemmy (on the server) regularly stuff will get stuck at the top of hot and/or active.

Asklemmy isn't really a place to ask about lemmy, it's for asking general questions to users of lemmy, jut like you wouldn't ask for Reddit support in /r/askreddit.

Regardless, this question gets asked and talked about in the !selfhosted@lemmy.world community fairly often, here is a (slightly edited) comment I made a while back.

You will need a domain name, you can buy one from a registrar such as hover or namecheap (for the love of all that you consider holy do not use godaddy).

You will need a way to expose the server that you set up via port forwarding or similar on your network.

You will need to set up DNS records on the domain you buy to point to your home IP. You may want to figure out a different way to avoid just handing that information out, cloudflare can help with that. You will want to make sure the DNS records get automatically updated if your IP address changes, which is not uncommon for residential ISPs.

You will need to figure out how to get an SSL certificate, Let’s Encrypt will issue them for free, cloudflare gives you one if you use them as a reverse proxy.

Some of this would likely be easier to do on a cloud provider like digitalocean or linode and could be done reasonably cheaply.

These are all common things for setting up any website, so lemmy docs won't cover them. In addition to those (this answer was just addressing "how to get a URL") you will need to install and configure lemmy, lemmy-ui, postgres, and pictrs somewhere (the join-lemmy docs cover this well).

If you want your instance to send emails you will have to figure out how you want to do that (too many options to cover in this answer).

When 0.18.1 gets released if you want captcha you'll probably have to figure out an mCaptcha provider or set that up yourself.

Not to mention thinking about backups, high availability, etc, etc.

As far as hardware to host on you could get away with like ~$10/mo on most any cloud provider, run it on a Mini-PC in your closet, etc. My instance uses 1-2 GB of RAM, ~13GB of disk (and growing a few hundred MB per day), and ~30% of a CPU (an old i5).

Best of luck.

I started on Gitlab, which was a monster to run. I moved to Gitea, until the developers started doing some questionable things. Now I'm on Forgejo (a fork of Gitea).

And make sure that identifier scheme still works if different people on different subscriptions download the source and compare to filter identifiers like that out...

I am a big fan of "mini desktop" computers for this sort of task (my lemmy instance is running on one). You can usually pick them up used/refurbished for pretty cheap with decent specs: i5 or better processors, upgradeable RAM (SO-DIMM), M.2 or 2.5in SSD. They are quite small, and relatively low power. I have a few in my homelab, and one acting as my media-center PC in my living room.

Yes. /s

1. You host it yourself
2. You can get a cool domain name
3. It's pretty low maintenance

Use a site like browse.feddit.de to find communities you want to join and join them. Every instance only "has" their local communities plus whatever remote communities the users of the instance join. With more users it is more likely someone else has subscribed to something you are interested in, but someone on e.g. lemmy.world had to be the first user there to search and subscribe to any community that isn't based on that instance.

The New Communities Community: !newcommunities@lemmy.world

So, hear me out... What if we put a scheme in place where anyone who wanted to use the API had to pay for access? And then we charge like 20x what we should to put them out of business. I am sure that would work out well.

To answer what I think you are getting at lemmy scales based on two things:

1. Database size (and write volume) scales mostly on what communities are being federated to you. Unless you are .world the volume of remote content is going to massively outweigh local content. On my (mostly) single-user instance I have found this to be the same with Pictrs as well, as it is mostly eating storage to store federated thumbnails.
2. Database read load scales mostly on the number of users you have. For a single-user instance this is pretty minimal. For an instance like .world (with thousands of users) I imagine it is significant and scaling postgres to have read-only replicas to scale this load.

~18 hours ago I wrote

My instance has been running for 23 days, and I am pretty much the only active local user:

7.3G    pictrs
5.3G    postgres

I may have a slight Reddit Lemmy problem

As of right now

7.5G    pictrs
5.7G    postgres

So my storage is currently growing at around 1G per day, though pictrs is mostly cached thumbnails so that should mostly level out at some point as the cache expires.

To answer your stated question: I run an instance on a mini PC with 32G of RAM (using <2G including all lemmy things such as pg, pictrs, etc and any OS overhead) and a quad core i5-6500T (CPU load usually around 0.3). You could probably easily run Lemmy on a Pi so long as you use an external drive for storage.

Lemmy caches every thumbnail of every post for like a month or something using Pictrs, so that storage will eventually hit a sort of equilibrium and start growing much more slowly (only reflecting post/thumbnail volume during the cache time).

Between profile images, community banners/icons, post images etc. there are probably a few dozen images that will be sticking around for the long haul at the moment.

Dokuwiki has a plugin that lets you use markdown instead of their proprietary markup.

The servers aren't even identified in the listing as R610s (or E01S, they misread that as "EOLS"), so who knows...

Mod to -A-1.

There are a few completely fair points in there calling out what they are legally allowed to do (e.g. they are not directly violating GPL) and are doing (contributing changes back upstream, they claim "always"), that's about the only "right" this reader found.

Have some quotes that demonstrate the "wrong":

I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.

Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make.

Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity.

Outline, Trillium, and silverbullet are some alternatives I've seen recommended in threads along with Joplin and Obsidian.

I personally run a dokuwiki (with a markdown plugin) and that's enough for me, call me old school if you must.

Someone mentioned the possibility all of this being a pretext to withdraw troops for "defense". That would be wonderful, but almost feels almost too much to hope for.

Users are empowered to set what they want their default homepage view to be ("Subscribed" , "All", or "Local"). I am unsure what the default is, but mine is set to "Subscribed" which I think it makes the most sense for most users.

Unless you are on a heavily moderated/defederated server (such as beehaw) whose moderation policies, politics, etc. you are aligned with it is very likely that "All" is going to contain something that someone doesn't like. I am personally not in favor of over-policing what users do outside the confines of their home instance, it's a fine line that I haven't had to define too clearly yet so perhaps my thoughts here will change.

If you don't like what's in "Local", then to me that is a sign that the instance isn't for you. Local is a reflection of the sort of content that users on that instance want to see more of. The admin allowing such content is not necessarily an endorsement (unless they were the one to actually post it), but is tacit acceptance of that content and the community that content exists in.

I think some way to make a "Curated" feed of posts only from certain approved communities would be a welcome feature and present a useful middle ground allowing for a moderatable discovery experience, like the default subscriptions provided on that other site.

Broadly, yes. The way federation works means anything any user on your instance is interested in will be sent to you once (at least posts/comments/votes/etc). Whenever someone on your instance views that thing that is a request that would otherwise be made to another instance. This does, however, increase the load of federation on servers hosting popular communities, as now they have to send each post/comment/vote/whatever to your instance. Unlike bit torrent there is only one place responsible for sending you all of the content that exists in a community, so the fediverse doesn't get p2p-style network effects where every peer/sever helps even a bit.

A single user instance is a little inefficient, unless you are actually looking at most/all of the content your instance receives, in which case it is probably a wash. The ideal for how federation is implemented in ActivityPub would be many similarly-sized (in terms of user count) instances with the most popular communities being spread out among them.

Sadly right now the most popular instances (lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmynsfw.com, kbin.social) are both where users and communities are, so the real gains to help those instances (several of which continue to struggle under the load) are really only medium and larger sized instances.

Unless your instance blocks or is blocked by that other instance, which is exactly what beehaw did to lemmy.world and sh.ithust.works, and exactly what I saw happen a lot on Mastodon.

Users on those instances need to search for your community then subscribe, only will then new posts/votes/comments show up. Federation is opt-in, not automatic.

IIRC Lemmy preloads all thumbnails for posts in communities you subscribe to into pictrs to be cached for like a month or something. So, yeah...

I understand that urge, and in my ideal world it would a whole new option of "Suggested" feed rather than a replacement for "All", like how that other site has a /all but defaults to a more curated selection of content that has broad appeal (and IIRC even some things are excluded from /all over there). For now I'd just take being able to filter the "All" view of the most objectionable stuff that I only want to allow users of my instance to explicitly opt into by seeking out those sorts of places.

Also, unless your instance is purposely seeking out and subscribing to every community in every instance the moment they are created "All" is never going to actually be all posts from everywhere... I imagine larger instances may approach that, but I am certain there is a ton missing from smaller instances like my own.

Is /trees for weed or arborists? Who moderates and decides? You have the same problem on that other site with things like /games vs /gaming vs /gamers vs true_gaming etc.

To me the bigger problem is discoverability. If there is nothing community at /piracy on my local instance something should ve done to show options of communities in the fediverse. Something like an integrated version of browse.feddit.de.