I have a pretty unique domain name and don’t mind the $7 a month to run the instance on AWS. I’m not going to do a ton with it, but I would if there was interest.
I already owned my own home server that I built for running a file server and other random things. Currently all I’m paying for is $2.50/month for a proxy server on Google Cloud so I don’t have to expose my stuff directly to the internet.
How does that Google cloud proxy server work?
It’s a bit of a janky solution, but I’m just running an openvpn server on the lowest tier vps which my home server auto-connects to on boot. From there it’s just iptables rules to reroute the external traffic through the VPN. I’ve also used it to proxy Minecraft servers and a few other things.
Would something like WireGuard do the same thing?
Yeah the choice of VPN doesn’t really matter here. I would just configure it to not push a default route to cut down on the amount of traffic going through. You could even use something like ZeroTier if you wanted.
Does that mean my actual home server is behind a VPN connection but has its traffic transparently routed to the external VPS, which eliminates the need for opening ports on the residential router?
Yeah, that’s originally why I had it set up this way because I was somewhere where I wasn’t able to open any ports.
We run ours, because we are two trans women that are fortunate enough to be able to afford to run an instance that specifically prioritises the needs of our community. It’s a way of using our privilege to create safe community spaces
Fantastic. You go girls 🥰
I’m selfhosting my instance for fun and not for profit. I’m using a server on Hetzner that costs me 4.11/mo. I’m the only active user of my instance, but I like to own my own data and selfhost my own services.
What spec did you go for?
I’m using cx11 currently which is plenty.
My point is that sure while it’s new and shiny everyone wants to try it out but I think over time people will get bored with self hosting lemmy and move onto other things. I might setup my own on a free tier VPS or something because that’s a thing for some reason, let Amazon Microsoft or oracle pay for it lol
Wait till someone builds a narrow AI just to maintain and update a server. The ability to conveniëntly self host services with a single installer is going to become a new commodity to sell next to freemium/subscription corporate services
No AI required https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible
Do i really need a dns sever if i am the only user? I am fine using my ip adress. I know a dns also enables https certification but i am my own network admin so do I really need it? My only concern is bad actors breaking into my server trough a vulnerability.
Do you mean a domain name? If so, I am 99% sure that federation (so your instance communicating with other instances) requires https, which would require you to use a domain name.
If you just wanted to run an isolated/private instance, then a domain name wouldn’t be required.
This is correct. Other servers will not connect with you if you don’t have a valid certificate.
Damned.
How is it independent if we rely on a dns service? When do we start building a decentralized dns network? /halfS (i will search if one exists after this comment and if not il see if duckdns is still free)
Yes, I’m using exactly that.
over time people will get bored with self hosting lemmy and move onto other things
I wouldn’t worry about that. At the same time, new people join lemmy. Most as users, but some as admins, and even a few as developers. At the moment, I believe the increase in new servers is way more capacity than we need for new users.
Looking around this thread made me happy (thanks for creating it!). It seems many people host for very admirable reasons, sometimes explicitly unselfish. I am grateful for this and totally fine when one of those people decides to step down for whatever reasons. It’s all part of the beauty of freedom.
From a user’s point of view, one might worry that users could be forced to move when an instance shuts down. Happened to me. Not great, but a piece of cake compared to migrating from another platform.
For statistical reasons, we can probably assume that most users will end up in stable instances with very few to zero moves.
To have some control over my data and for the fun of it. With money? Selfhosting to me is a hobby and it has also taught me a lot, some of which has been helpful on my career.
As far as I understand it currently people host their own Lemmy instances just for the hell of it or out of the goodness of their heart
But the larger instances will end up costing more money and I’m doubtful that will be sustainable with no income
Larger instances will either have more donators or close their subscriptions if it really is unsustainable.
The more Lemmy grows, the more instances will show up, which will help spread the load.
You speak of sustainability but Lemmy survived the wave of incoming Redditors without much downtime. It’s really impressive that this growth could happen. That’s the power of decentralized systems: they scale!
Alot of the larger instances have user donations set up so that the servers can be maintained, this is how lemmy.world works
You can do your part! I set up a recurring donation recently, recurring donations are much better for the sustainment of an instance since the owner knows they can keep running and not have to worry about intermittent donations.
Crazy-ish idea, but maybe Lemmy could make a feature where instances can have custom awards similar to Reddit gold and stuff, and users can buy them to both award posts they like and financially support the instance host
Hope not, trophies and award whoring is just as bad as karma whoring and neither is a thing here and lemmy is better off because of it.
Yeah I’d kinda rather stick to donations tbh
One other thing I don’t see people pointing out is that Lemmy is basically a successor to classic web forums, so companies may run their own so they can have full control over the experience and moderation like for movies, series’s, or games, and in which case they would be more than happy to eat the cost of hosting. For example there could be a Lemmy.Disney.com instance to act as a Disney sanctioned discussion zone for their products where they could put tons of moderation rules in place.
Users actually run a lot of larger instances on the Fediverse off of donations! I run a larger Mastodon server and we get literally double our monthly costs in donations. For every month we stay open, that is two months longer we stay open. Absolutely wild. We have about 1.5k users, with about 20-30 of them donating maybe $5-10 monthly. That’s 2%-ish of the user base donating. Lemmy is LEAGUES easier to host given that it’s written in Rust and is incredibly resource efficient. So I can only imagine it’ll be even cheaper to host on donations.
Well the bigger ones do take donations, and its working out fine… you can see the same thing working on other fediverse platforms
I want my own space in the internet and I set aside money for it monthly from my paychecks
In the medium term I’m confident costs could be met using patreon or something similar for large instances.
Plenty of people willingly paid for reddit awards etc. I think most of us feel more loyalty to Lemmy than reddit in the light of recent events.
I just finished setting up this instance yesterday. I also self host a few other things. Self hosting is fun for me, but probably not most people. I honestly don’t know what I’m doing but I’m doing it and it’s working lol
I also really enjoy knowing I literally own all my own data. It’s stored locally on my personal server. As for cost, I’m just using a mini PC someone in my family gifted to me. It’s got some hardware limitations but that’s more in theory than practice, but that’s because it’s only me and a few others who use the server so load is really low.
I also really enjoy knowing I literally own all my own data. It’s stored locally on my personal server.
As far as I understand the fediverse, that’s not necessarily the case. Let’s take a local community with a post or comment of yours as an example, and see how it could go wrong.
When users from other instances subscribe, the community is copied to their instance, including your content. If federation is broken, or any of the two instances go offline, you can still change or delete your local data, but not the remote copy.
Hey I was trying to reply to you yesterday about looking into lemmy.hjson, but the send button wasn’t working for some reason in jerboa. Is all working now?
I was thinking of doing it so certain communities from the other place would feel welcome, but someone is domain squatting what I was planning
I’m hosting my own because it’s fun and it’s cheap to do it. I imagine it could get expensive to host bigger instances, and at that point the admins would likely look to donations to keep things going.
How much does it cost to run an instance?
About $5-$10 per month. I’m using an ARM64 system which make it even cheaper.
I hope eventually RISC-V will become viable.
I love playing with computers. That’s about it in general.
I’ve been using Hetzner to get dedicated hosts before and I have had two mediocre servers as a playground for some time now so why not add another service to the stack, arr-I mean yeah
I started !programming.dev because I am a moderator of several 100k+ subs over on Reddit and I didn’t want my communities to not have a place to go if Reddit crashed and burned (even though it’s incredibly unlikely). The main sub I moderated (/r/ExperiencedDevs) for years wanted user verification to combat the spam that was newbies commenting and posting about things they didn’t really know or understand. This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn’t really care about their communities.
I am also a strong supporter of pulling control away from megacorps. We need more small to medium sized businesses on the planet.
For selfish reasons? I wanted to work on something new and have true ownership over it, the ability to build a community that worked together to build something without capitalism standing in the way. It might seem strange, but one of the first things I did was bring multiple other people on board to help me maintain the server, even going so far as to add domain managers to the domain name. This was all to counter the major questions people were asking around “what if the host decides they don’t want to host anymore?”. Well hopefully the programming.dev community is willing to take that burden if the time ever comes, even though I hope it doesn’t. I also wanted to start something similar to a coop, where ownership is shared, meaning users have incentives to make the platform better. I have lots of ideas around this, but this will never be possible on Reddit. It is quite feasible here.
I also had the chance to buy an incredibly dope domain name! https://programming.dev! Why wouldn’t I jump at that chance? And I get to even use it instead of let it flounder. So many reasons to host something like this, to build a trusting community, a safe space to have to let people talk about a shared love/topic/hobby.
Honestly the domain name is a fantastic choice; Much easier to feel comfortable sharing links to my colleagues from programming.dev than something like “shit just works” or “lemmy world”
Totally agree with the dope domain name. Not going to lie, a big reason for picking
programming.devwas to be /u/[email protected]This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn’t really care about their communities.
Just curious how you think you might go about this. Do you plan on contributing yourself, forking, or using the community to influence the direction/prioritization of new features?
I have a 4 core 24 GB ARM VPS on that Oracle free tier that I use to self host some personal services.
I just think it’s neat.
Oh shit really? You get that much processing power for free? I gotta sign up to that
What’s the catch? How long does the free tier last?
There’s always a catch. Oracle has and will claw back that free allowance unless you meet specific criteria or move to a pay-as-you-go tier with a cc on file with a $100 authorization charge, and even then they may. Ask me how I know lol
Or they’ll just shut it down with no explanation whatsoever, even if you’ve met all of their weird criteria.
There are two classic blunders. The most famous is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”, but only slightly less well-known is this: “Never go into business with Oracle when anything of value is on the line”.
Never go into business with Oracle when anything of value is on the line
Truer words have not been spoken.
That’s not even considering that you’re not going to be able to talk to a rep about it, or appeal that claw back in any way. Hell they’ll even terminate your whole account without warning, not just the VM. If I found out the admin of the Lemmy instance I’m using was hosting it on Oracle I would delete my profile immediately without a second thought.
If I found out the admin of the Lemmy instance I’m using was hosting it on Oracle I would delete my profile immediately without a second thought.
Agreed. I still feel dirty for taking Google’s side in that ridiculous lawsuit Oracle filled after buying Sun. Only Oracle would try to make money from licensing fees for APIs…wait a minute…has Spez been talking to Elon Musk AND Larry Ellison?
One other catch is that is an ARM instance
Me too, works well!
is this a dedicated vm or something else?
