I did it, but my buddy has a server with extra resources that he doesn’t care if I use and I already owned domains.
Say $20/yr for domain, Lemmy needs around 150MB of RAM and almost no CPU. You could easily do that for $5/mo. Slice up the domain renewal, call it $8.
So far, there are upsides and downsides.
The upsides, I can federate with anyone I want and it’s unlikely that they’ll defederate with me because I’m one guy, and maybe a handful of friends if they want accounts. Two, I wanted something I could use as a blog anyway, so I made a mod only community on my instance where I can blog. I don’t care if people read it or not, it just seemed fun.
Downside, finding communities is relatively more laborious. I have to go to other instances and look at their communities, or all feeds, to find things to subscribe to at home. Which means for each one, I need to copy the link or name, go to my instance’s search, then go to the communities tab and subscribe. On a big instance, someone probably already searched for a lot of communities at least once, which is enough to index it. But on your own, you gotta do it yourself and it can get a little tedious.
Overall, I’m liking running my own though, so I plan to keep doing that.
Discoverability is one of the biggest weaknesses Lemmy has right now. It should be entirely fixable, though. A way to auto-index the list of communities on a given instance would be a great start.
Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.
I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.
Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community from what I hear and that sucks.
I can completely understand why that wouldn’t be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.
I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.
*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.
And this is why you roll your own instance just for auth
At this point I’m considering it. I wonder how much it costs.
I’m using a $6 a month digital ocean droplet. Should be plenty of juice for me and my friends.
I did it, but my buddy has a server with extra resources that he doesn’t care if I use and I already owned domains.
Say $20/yr for domain, Lemmy needs around 150MB of RAM and almost no CPU. You could easily do that for $5/mo. Slice up the domain renewal, call it $8.
So far, there are upsides and downsides.
The upsides, I can federate with anyone I want and it’s unlikely that they’ll defederate with me because I’m one guy, and maybe a handful of friends if they want accounts. Two, I wanted something I could use as a blog anyway, so I made a mod only community on my instance where I can blog. I don’t care if people read it or not, it just seemed fun.
Downside, finding communities is relatively more laborious. I have to go to other instances and look at their communities, or all feeds, to find things to subscribe to at home. Which means for each one, I need to copy the link or name, go to my instance’s search, then go to the communities tab and subscribe. On a big instance, someone probably already searched for a lot of communities at least once, which is enough to index it. But on your own, you gotta do it yourself and it can get a little tedious.
Overall, I’m liking running my own though, so I plan to keep doing that.
150 MB of RAM is a bit optimistic. However I agree that you should be okish with cheap 1GB 1vCPU VMs for a one user instance.
Maybe even host it on an old laptop you can use as a server.
Discoverability is one of the biggest weaknesses Lemmy has right now. It should be entirely fixable, though. A way to auto-index the list of communities on a given instance would be a great start.
Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.
I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.
Doing it in a federated way.
Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community from what I hear and that sucks.
I can completely understand why that wouldn’t be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.
I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.
*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.