I stood up a Yunohost and installed Mastodon a few months back. I had issues with storage and exponential growth as a result of federating with other instances.
It was just too much work keeping the storage at a minimal level for a single user instance, so I ditched it.
Is there anything like that I need to consider before I try my hand at Lemmy?
Too soon to tell for sure. Though I’m curious to see how the larger instances deal with storage growth, especially for the database.
One smaller gotcha is that lemmy-ansible only supports apt. README doesn’t mention that at all.
If you gave up running a single user instance of Mastodon then I really don’t think you should be running a Lemmy instance. It’s a fediverse compliant system that will have many of the same issues as Mastodon.
I run a small 10 person Instance of Mastodon and it runs very well on a small server of 4GB Memory and 100GB disk. Not sure why you had issues with a 1 man instance.
Out of interest why would you want to run a 1 man Lemmy Instance?
I’m not alone.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20255
Compute was never an issue. I had my instance hosted on Hetzner and it ran just fine.
My concern is the storage, as described above, constantly checking disk space, cronjobs, purging etc etc
And whether I host a single user or a multi user instance is neither here or there. My question still stands.
Cloud storage is expensive. Physical storage is cheaper in the long run. Might be a good candidate to actually self-host on-prem. Throw a bunch of SATA SSDs at it, which are astonishingly dirt cheap nowadays and probably fast enough for a medium-sized instance; maybe add an NVMe disk cache if you want to be fancy.
One of these months (or years…) fiber will finally be available in my area, at which point I’m going to move most of my servers from the cloud to on-prem. But for now I can’t, because 10 Mbps upload is a pretty tight bottleneck…
I never had to check disk space, cron jobs or do any purging.
Where did you run you Mastodon Instance. I run mine at Digitial Ocean, been running for nearly a year and have not encountered any issues and I’m running on the cheapest server they have.
These things hurt me while setting up my Lemmy instance on my Raspberry Pi 4 via Docker.
- The instance name must be less than or equal to 20 characters in length (database limit)
- The lemmy and lemmy-ui docker images must be arm64 (for my Ubuntu 22.04 setup on my RaspberryPi)
- The certbot image needs to be added to the docker-compose from the docker install instructions and “depend_on” the nginx image
- I needed to disable the 80->443 redirect in my nginx config in order to get my initial cert (maybe there’s another way)
- The lemmy container needs its own network to allow it to access the internet (permitting searching)
Disk space is a bit of a concern since I started hosting this instance. The Lemmy database is 12.2GB and pictrs is 1.8GB after a little over a month. I set all images to convert to WEBP and scale down to save on disk space but the database is growing pretty fast. From my understanding, they already fixed this and we’re just waiting for 0.18.3 to release.
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You can save posts :)
Not in Mlem… yet :)
