AS a ex single lemmy user, yes. I use PieFed instead. Background: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed
Yes join the dosins of us 🥧
I mean you jest, hence upvoting, but I also find it funny that more people use PieFed now than are on lemmy.ml (edit: to explain, that is by far the most talked about instance across the entire Threadiverse). On PieFed.social alone there are >1k active users.
would be nice if it's possible to use mlmym with piefed... luckily it seems like boost and voyager now works tho
As others have already said, piefed is much lighter than lemmy, and is what I’m running as well, my instance isn’t necessarily single-user, (anyone’s free to join), but there’s only one other user on my instance
yeeeeaaaahhhhh boiiiiii
And there they are!
as a single user lemmy, no
I run a single user PieFed instance for a month now. Compatible with Lemmy. Everything runs smooth so far.
Hi, single user lemmy instance here. I'd say it's been smooth sailing for now. I might consider moving to piefed like other folks here, but I'll keep it and see. Right now i can't even upgrade due to arm64 docker images are broken at the moment, but it's sufficient enough.
EDIT: Seems like it's fixed, yippee :D https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6201#issuecomment-3693373333 kudos to mattlqx :)
How much storage is it using?
~3GB according to postgres, ~545MB for the pictures. Not too bad actually.
That's pretty good!
I run a single user instance and it's horribly slow. Mostly because I only have HDDs and not enough RAM to compensate. I hope Lemmy 1.0 will increase database performance.
Piefed is supposedly much more performant. But I'm shying away from migrating because I don't want to lose my post history and uploaded pictures.
Maybe there's a way to import contents through federation? Just, if both run on the same hardware when doing it (possibly the new instance on a subdomain), both would run way slower.
Canceling all subscriptions would probably make Lemmy use almost no resources.
It's something I've wanted to do for a while. Honestly I want to host a Lemmy instance and my own peertube instance.
Two things are stopping me. I don't understand certain points of how things interact in the software or how to set it up properly to self host and be comfortable in it's security. I barely understand docker and some other stuff. It sucks because I understood how to use DOS at an around 14 by reading the manual. I also don't have the funding to do so in a way that I would feel comfortable at this point. I don't fully trust co-mingling my home services with web services due to the security risks.
Maybe try something like YunoHost. That's a web server Linux distribution. And it's supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You'd need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn't the only option to help with the set up.)
But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.
I will have to take another look. I've seen it before but didn't see anything about Lemmy and such.
YuNoHost is a great alternative, but if you really want to learn, I would instead recommend really spending some time learning Docker; you don't have to understand how to build your own images (although that is also very useful), but mostly what is going on at a high level, and then switch to Docker Compose. These days it is extremely easy to run very complex architectures with a single compose file.
You also don't need to make it public for your tests, you can always start with local ip addresses and you own computer, or if you have a small computer that can run headless, then you can setup your experiments in there.
This is like the opposite of what you want to do for complex software - don't add more abstraction, or you won't know what to do when stuff goes wrong!
I did it for a while but my system was constantly busy and there was this controversy about the image cache and possible CSAM which then prompted me to switch to using the flagship instance. Haven't tried any of the alternatives, though.
Another single-user Piefed guy weighing in. Do it.
Running "my" own single user instance here.
Great! Love it! The whole idea.
Thanks for all the feedback!
I’m going to take a look at PieFed, maybe run both in parallel for a few weeks and see which one fells better 😉.
I did it for a while and it was a fun little technical project but once the pictrs image cache exhausted the amount of storage I got in the cloud host service's free tier, I stopped because I didn't feel like spending money on it
I run dullsters.net which is sort of a single user instance. Nobody else can make accounts it's strictly for one community.
My instance runs great... I've got it on NVME drives and a system with 64GB of RAM. When I was hosting it on Digital Ocean, I often ran into performance issues with RAM (I think I just had 2GB). Since the switch it's been rock solid.
I am running them on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM and a 2TB NVMe SSD. Loving it.
And now running both Lemmy and PieFed side by side (OP, posting from my PieFed account).
I think admin wise I am going to stick with PieFed. Definitely liking it more!
I'm hosting the Decronym bot on a single-user instance, and it's a real pain. The bot's been down for weeks, actually, because an upgrade failed with some obscure error around the database schema...
I've ended up just today, wiping the whole thing and starting over, losing all data and having to refederate the bot. So yeah, I wouldn't recommend.
[Acronyms to help the bot re-establish: LVM, HASS, k8s]
I run a more-or-less single user instance. It's fine. Not the fastest page-loads but otherwise NBD.
Directly compatible with Lemmy, there's Friendica (Facebook-like; also compatible with Twitter-like posts e.g. from Mastodon), Mbin (simplified/cleaner UI; also hybrid like Friendica), and PieFed (apparently more Reddit-like than Lemmy from what I read, in a technical sense).
Dunno which are better/worse to run, but I remember seeing hardware requirements on the docs of each of them.
Also it's not uncommon to see single user instances from my experience. But if you feel it's a waste of domain/resources, you could also create some dedicated community or something to give further use for it.
Also on the images issue pointed by another user, maybe also see if Lemmy now has a solution for it, or if any of the alternatives do.
The solution is to not proxy images. Might even be the default by now. That's a huge resource hog. No idea what pictrs is doing but it's still taking up a whole lotta space just for my own images.
Tangencial comment, but as I'd presume your instance is running on a Linux server (usually sites are), maybe check with ncdu (if available) which folders are the biggest?
I did it for a while but I had loads of annoying lags in updates, guess you had to roam around to get things going, maybe it's all okay now, IDK. If it's just for surfing I don't see any reason to do it, otherwise it was a fun experiment.
i am considering spinning up a piefed boi, which at the most, would end up with maybe 5 users.
we'll see!
Having to run a full-blown PostgreSQL instance just for a single user is a show-stopper for me.
Have run Lemmy and now Piefed, it's nice to have things customized to your wants, but probably wouldn't bother if it was setting up a host just for that.
Also might be worth thinking about what else you are self hosting. Don't want to self host all of your communication apps; that would be brittle.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HASS | Home Assistant automation software |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| HTTPS | HTTP over SSL |
| LVM | (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| k8s | Kubernetes container management package |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #982 for this comm, first seen 5th Jan 2026, 18:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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