If I were to create a new instance of lemmy do I set up my own server in my house, or am I just creating an instance on one of the lemmy servers?
There are no “the Lemmy servers”, since there is no central “Lemmy” central organization to host and run such servers.
So yeah, you can run it on whatever you can find that has available disk space, CPU cycles, and an Internet connection. Hosted VPS, colocated hardware server, raspberry pi, your gaming rig, AWS containers, whatever.
Can’t wait for someone to run an instance on a homebrewed DS and see people asking why “lemmy.ds is down all the time??”
Or a Samsung fridge.
The race is open!
Aw dude is someone gonna host a instance from a pee’n’see just to show off
Brb, taping some PS3’s together.
if only I hadn’t bricked my jailbroken ps3. rust should be able to compile down to ppc64le Linux binaries
Or, to put it in a simple one-liner: Instances are servers.
However you would set up any other server, you set up a Lemmy instance. There is no central datacenter as there would be with a corporate-owned site like Reddit.
Think of it like a bunch of little messages board sites and they automatically import posts from other message board sites - because that’s exactly what it is.
While that’s a bit different to navigate than what we are used to, an instance (aka a server) going down or becoming hostile and being defederated only removes that one server from the network.
It’s similar to how IRC networks function; except with those, the server owners decide what servers they link up with. With Lemmy (and other ActivityPub based services), the users decide (by subscribing). Instance admins can block (“defederate”) other instances though.
lemmy can run on a decent variety of hardware, just has to be some thing left on 24/7 and exposed to the internet (be careful, the internet is a hostile place… mine was getting scanned and poked constantly until I put it behind cloudflare and then locked the firewall down to just let in cloudflare), and of course more users take more powerful hardware.
For my personal just me instance though, I’m just running it on a Raspberry Pi 4 I run some other stuff on. Uses less than a gig of memory.
How can I tell if my instance is being probed for security issues?
You’ll need to have some kind of monitoring in place. Firewall logs, packet capture (i.e. wireshark), security onion, and a bunch of other security logging/monitoring tools. If you’re hosting on the cloud, your provider may have some free tools you can use (i.e. CASB).
I’m currently hosting on a spare computer that I had lying around that I installed Linux on. So I’ll probably need to do some research and set this up.
My dad had a web page recently get attacked, and they ended up injecting a program into his server and it started executing itself. He didn’t look into what it was actually running, but I can’t imagine it was doing anything good. Like, if it were just crypto mining, that would be a best case scenario. I’m sure it got in because he never updates anything. He was running his web page on a very, very old version of php, with a very old version of apache2 as the webserver.
I just want to make sure that I’m aware of if someone is trying to do something similar to me.
There is no need to check. Everything exposed to the internet is being scanned. (The only exception is maybe IPv6 with no specific TLS cert.)
Assume it is.
Running my own instance for our community (on a cheap Synology NAS) was something my dumbass considered when making the move here from Reddit. I’m glad I didn’t and just left it to the professionals, seeing as even experienced admins like Ruud have trouble with DDoS attacks and other shit.
A pi4 has the power for it? I would assume Lemmy would chew into the drive space
The Pi4 is a pretty impressive little machine. It’ll probably host a few users, but from what I understand, it’s the federation that really starts scaling the requirements.
Bigger problem with the Pi though is that it runs off an SDcard (by default), which have limited writes, and you’ll burn that up fast.
IIRC it’s technically possible to attach an external harddrive to a Raspberry Pi if it has its own power supply.
I seem to remember doing a botch where I took a USB hard disk drive that was supposed to get its power from the PC through the cable and rerouted the power over USB lines to a dedicated power brick.
My memory says I carefully removed a section of mantle in the middle of the drive’s USB cable, cut the power carrying lines but leaving the data lines intact, cut one end of a different USB cable, connected the power lines of that with the cut power lines of the drive’s cable (only on the drive side, obviously), put the intact end of the second cable into a USB charge plug, and connected the drive and RPi as if the RPi were a regular PC.
I’m pretty sure it worked.
So you would just add another (or larger) drive, right? A Pi itself doesn’t even have a drive.
It has the power to run a one user instance, I’m sure it would run into issues trying to squeeze a normal amount of people onto it, but a handful sure.
I run everything off an external hard drive
In your heart ❤️
This is the only thing that makes sense, considering everyone is a bot except me.
That sounds like something a bot would say.
A Lemmy instance runs on a computer (server) and that server could be anything from a VPS you rent to your own computer in your home.
My instance is hosted on my own hardware, at my home.
normally you’d rent out a server (vps) and run it on there but hosting from your house would also work. the whole idea about Lemmy is that each instance is ran on different servers by different people
I’d be hesitant to run it at your own house. While you can use a cloudflare tunnel, I’d never expose anything in my home network to the outside.
Digital ocean is cheap, there’s another called hetzner which looks also pretty cheap. So you start will rent 1 core VPS for 5 bucks, it’s enough to run your own instance but not really enough to host any communities.
+1 for Hetzner. Their servers are reliable and reasonably cheap.
Yeah, most likely your ISP will just stop you. Home internet plans in the US today almost all disallow using the service for public hosting.
that part isn’t a problem with Irish isps, I run a variety of things to myself without problems
France here, runs like a charm (finally!) on an old dell box at home.
lemmy.mindoki.com yay!
Now I just have to decide what I should actually do with it :-)
I host a few purely personal services exposed to the net…
But when I wanted to set up a lemmy instance I got a VPS. Too public.
And since I had more resources than I needed I opened it for others to register too :)
At least one user has surpassed me in number of comments (~600) so I helped the fediverse a bit
In most cases, you’d rent a VPS (Virtual Private Server) from one of numerous providers who have data centres all over the world.
It’s possible to host an instance at your home or whatever but residential internet connections are usually noticeably slower for people accessing them remotely.
One of the main benefits of decentralised platforms like lemmy is that everyone has the option to host their stuff on hardware they control. Even if you’re using a VPS in a data centre somewhere, you have some level of control.
Usually high up in the clouds.
Very high indeed, you need “grass” to get up there.
Did you have a look at this guide? https://lemm.ee/post/37715
Mine is on a server I rent but there’s absolutely no reason it can’t be in my house. My other federated servers are.
I’m running a Pixelfed instance off of an old PC in my house. Eventually I 'd like to set up a personal Lemmy instance as well.
“lemmy” itself is just a type of website we call instances, so people and organization host it themselves in the place of their choice
