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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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I think it's a matter of personal preference.
I've been running my own Mastodon instance for several months now, and I've enjoyed it. I don't have to rely on someone else, either, which is nice. I'm in control of everything on that instance.
As for Lemmy, I just started my own instance today, and am currently writing you from it. What made me decide to setup my own instance was some performance issues I was seeing with Lemmy.world, although that might have been an UI problem. Anyway, I enjoy doing this stuff, so I'm running my own instance for the sake of doing it.
On the flip side, it's more expensive and time consuming, and I'm the one who has to worry about backing up data, etc. Like I said, though, I enjoy doing it, so it's no big deal.
Can you go into more detail on this?
Sure.
I run my own instance at a cloud provider, and thus have monthly expenses I wouldn't normally incur, if I were using a public instance.
The fun part is that you can run it on the same server as your mastodon is already running with no additional costs.
Sure, one could do that, but I prefer to keep things separate.
Oh, gotcha. I guess if using a personal local server, then the only recurring cost would be electricity.
Yes, there is electricity.
I think Internet connectivity could also be an issue, unless you have an ISP that's friendly to you running a publicly accessible server on your Internet connection at home.
Could you run a local server on your desktop that you only turn on whenever as a client? I don't really understand the Fediverse's architecture yet, but as far as I saw instances being down are not a big problem beyond not being able to log in if it's your home instance, and communities fracturing to separate discussions in other instances' local federation caches that only get resynced when the thing comes back up.
What prevents me from running my own instance as a very heavy client? Discounting the public DNS + static globally routable IP part as those can be solved IMO.
I've wondered that myself, and I don't know, to be honest, but there are some issues you'd certainly encounter. For example, if you posted any media it would need to be somewhere "always on" or remote instances and users might not be able to see it unless they managed to cache it on time. It means that your posts URLs wouldn't be accessible, and would only be available on servers to which it has already federated. There may be other issues, too, such as queues only keeping undelivered messages for so long, etc.
I'm sure someone with a good understanding of ActivityPub could explain whether or not this is possible.
Yes you could, but if your instance is down often, it might be that there is some timeout in ActivityPub when your instance will be marked as gone for others and might not get new content once it is up again.
Can you tell me a bit about the process you went through to create your own instance? I'd like to make one myself.
You're talking about Lemmy, right?
I provisioned an Ubuntu 22.02 server at Linode. I chose their 2 GB Shared CPU instance type. Once I configured the server to my liking, I ran through the Lemmy-Ansible instructions. (They have other methods, so check the documentation.)
Essentially, you install Ansible on your workstation. I'm on macOS and installed it via Homebrew. You then download their git repository, create the necessary configuration files, and then have Ansible configure the server. It was fairly simple.
I may go that route. I was wanting to host my own server but I feel like it would be easier to just use a cloud server
It's personal preference, but I find it easier, for sure.
how much does your mastadon instance cost per month? what do you expect for lemmy?
I'm using Linode, and their prices are publicly available.
https://www.linode.com/pricing/
For Mastodon, I'm using the Linode 4 GB while the Lemmy server runs on the Linode 2 GB option. Both are under the Shared CPU pricing -- not dedicated.
thanks for all of the information you've shared in this thread.
i was put off by the cost and effort involved in maintaining a mastadon instance when i looked into that a while back, but i'm glad to hear that lemmy could be cheaper.
I already have a nomad cluster in my homelab, running Lemmy is a no brainer.
As someone who likes having control over their data and especially backups, and someone who normally enjoys self-hosting things, I honestly might do it. I'm not sure if I'd want to host a lemmy instance or kbin instance though, since I know they all federate together anyway. I may also end up waiting until the software is more mature too before looking into it.
That's awesome! Running my own social media instances has become a hobby for me.
Having my own Lemmy instance has felt fairly seamless versus using Lemmy.world, but there have been some kinks. For example, when attempting to subscribe to a new community, the server has to pull a bunch of data first. This takes several seconds, but the UI simply says "not found" -- and then after several seconds, the UI updates with the community you want to follow. I figured this out by tailing the logs.
Also, the installation was pretty damn easy, especially when compared to Mastodon.
I'd maybe be interested in trying out self-hosting Mastodon at some point too, good to hear that Lemmy was easy to install though. I'm not too worried since I have quite a bit of Linux experience, I figure it probably won't be too bad to setup whatever social media instances I'm interested in checking out.
Yeah, if you've got a decent amount of Linux experience, I don't think you'll have any issues. Mastodon's installation is well-documented and works. My only criticism is that it's a bit long and you have to be careful not to miss anything.
On the other hand, I recall installing Pixelfed back several months ago and having a difficult time. The documentation was lacking, and it required me to use Arch Linux, which I had never used. I was able to get it working, but eventually terminated the instance after a while because I was never using it.
Oof, yeah, requiring someone to use Arch definitely seems like a steep requirement lol
Yea, but then they can say "I use arch btw". That's what really matters in life.
#goals
LOL
It wasn't bad -- I just wasn't familiar with it.
As someone that has spent the better part of the week mucking with it.... the kbin build docs have multiple gaps in the documentation and are functionally broken unless you have some better understanding of the setup. I WAS able to get the system built, but could never get it online. Best i got was 500 errors where the UI was up but there was a break somewhere in Redis, Postgres, Nginx etc. All the logs were clean though. This was with the docker method and build from source method on both Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian 11 (which are what he specifically referenced)
Lemmy was much easier to setup using the ansible method. I have an instance online. Though im still working out the federation thing and some other kinks. I figured it would just reach out to Activity pub and federate with everyone but now it seems I have to build a static list...If if search for an instance i know exists I get a
So there are some gaps but it seems much more mature. For example you cant mark your instance private AND have federation enabled. If you do that and restart the instance will fail to come up, but theres no warning or error in the UI.
I like the kbin dev better as people. But the lemmy code is definately more polished, even if the devs are turd sammiches.
I run my own Mastodon instance, but for Lemmy it seemed more logical to join an existing instance that aligned with my interests. I wouldn't be adverse to abandoning my self-hosted Mastodon for a shared instance, but I would prefer a small instance run by and for people I know, rather than one of the huge ones.
What might make you want to ditch your self-hosted Mastodon instance?
With Lemmy, I didn't feel a need to pick any specific instance because I can follow communities from anywhere, and it seems to work pretty well.
One downside I've encountered with my own Lemmy instance is that post and comment history in the communities I follow begins when I started following them on my new instance. New posts and comments are federated my way, going forward, but I don't have the ability to go back and view as much history as one would on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, for example.
I have experienced the same with mastodon and pixelfed.
I didn't have this problem with Mastodon, but totally had it with Pixelfed. I don't think Pixelfed, at least at that time, supported relays. I scraped around pixelfed.social to find people to follow because I had an account there. It didn't seem possible at the time to see profiles on public servers, without having an account, so it was hard finding people. It was something I was used to do doing on Mastodon. In the end, I didn't have a positive experience running my own Pixelfed instance, and just decided to use pixelfed.social.
I do follow the developer and he's been making a lot of great progress. I've got the mobile app, and it's quite decent.
I really like Pixelfed too, the developer is very nice and very responsive.
Basically just the hastle of maintaining and hosting it. My ideal situation would be an instance with a few people, where we can share some of the burden, and perhaps cost. But maybe that has its own headaches when there is a falling out etc.
There are also other drawbacks with your own Mastodon instance in terms of discovering new people, as a lot of those tools are geared towards the server scope, and Mastodon prohibits a full index search.
I actually don't know what the Lemmy policy is on indexing, but a way to search the entire Fediverse (or at least large parts of it) would help tremendously in popularizing it, I think. I understand why indexing would be blocked, but that seems a lot like security by obscurity to me, which I don't think works very well.