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Tips and advice for hosting an instance (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by Condiment2085@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemm.ee

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I'm interested in hosting my own Lemmy instance. Never done any hosting but I have done a good bit of programming/web development in my life so I don't think I'll struggle.

Just curious if anyone has any good advice or common mistakes that I could avoid.

Also if there is already a thread or community around creating Lemmy instances, I'd love links to them!

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[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How big of an instance? Hoe many users do you imagine or intend on hosting? What kind of communities? Do you have a specific theme or raison d'etre?

What sort of tools or support do you think you will need? What kind of tools do you think your users will need? How familiar are you with other forum-like platforms on the fediverse?

I would make a list of all of your needs and then do a comparison of Lemmy, PieFed, mbin, nodeBB, and other group-focused federated offerings to see what makes the most sense for your imagined use case. They all have different strengths, weaknesses, and requirements. Set them up and test them on different subdomains so you don't pollute your namespace on remote instances while testing.

[–] Condiment2085@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago

Great questions!

Just to start, I wanted it to be small and maybe just have some friends on it. If I enjoy it a lot and more people I know want to join - great. It's more of just a test for fun and if it is something I enjoy doing I'll keep doing it.

My main reason is just to be a local person hosting an instance so that my community might be more likely to join the fediverse. Maybe if they trust me, they will trust the fediverse more, and so on. Also I think a big benefit of the fediverse is the local effect - so I'd love to help out in that way if I can.

Right now in my initial planning, I was thinking about getting a VPS and setting Lemmy up on that. Long term I'd like to self host with hardware at home but I don't have the space or budget for that right now and VPS seemed like a good starting point.

As far as other services, I really like Lemmy and it feels the most approachable for "normies" that don't want a complicated onboarding. I know a lot of people who are kind of sick of "big social" so I think they would like the familiar design of Lemmy. I could be wrong there as I haven't tried any other platforms you listed.

Thanks for your input, you've really made me think!