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?
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.
Mastodon caches images from remote instances, Lemmy doesn’t. It links, which has it’s own issues (images disappearing from remote posts if the instance goes down). Everybody I’ve seen complaining about storage space have been open Lemmy instances with loads of users potentially uploading images to the pictrs sub-system. There’s even been requests to limit image storage for individual users.
If you’re thinking of using the YunoHost version of Lemmy, be aware that the pictrs subsystem is removed due to technical issues, I would absolutely recommend using the ansible install. But that might defeat the purpose of easy self-hosting for most YunoHost users…
From a non-technical aspect, the biggest issue (or at least used to be) on Lemmy was the ideological attacks and isolation by the fascist core community of any non-conforming instance. That had a chokehold on the lemmyverse to the point I saw no point running a Lemmy instance unless I self-censored my sometimes negative opinions of the Chinese government. Seeing the core developers being willing to hold back their own project was the biggest surprise when self-hosting Lemmy.
Thank you for responding.
I agree, the Ansible route is very daunting and does negate the user friendly appeal of Federated social media. But, it’s early days and I am hoping there will be an emergence of one-click installs soon.
This is digressing somewhat but what’s the deal with Lemmy / China / CCP? I’m a relatively normal 40 something. I just want to use the internet in a normal fashion.
Lemmy is created by what many describes as “tankies”, fundamentalist communists. The lead devs are, in my impression generally supportive of the Chinese government. They run their own instances, dedicated to their own world view and interests. I don’t have the slightest problem with that.
Hopefully due to a lack of foresight their instance was presented as a flagship instance on the official landing page and other places, effectively making it the representative for Lemmy for a long time. With their moderation practices, they in large parts drove away what I consider reasonable users regardless of personal ideology.
This created an monolithic instance that dwarfed every single instance besides one; the other dev-run instance which seems like a containment instance for those too fundamentalist to stay on the “main” server. For a large part Lemmy was a downright nasty monoculture that would harass even lead developers for daring to interact with code-contributing users on instances deemed “problematic”.
With a very generous blocking practice, these monolithic instance basically shut out anybody not agreeing with them from the majority of content - including non-political. This in turn gave other instances less of a reason reason to stay on the Lemmyverse which reinforced the monoculture.
The devs did take steps to rectify this problem: they offered a year of free Lemmy hosting for anybody willing to admin a general purpose instance, recruited other general purpose instances to promote on join-lemmy.org. I respect that. But at that time it seemed too late to change the direction. When I realized the bad reputation Lemmy as a project had amongst some of the larger fediverse influencers, I realized that Lemmy would not be viable until it got a massive and sudden influx of new users to shake up the overall federated lemmy community. And now here we are!
Kind of hilarious that a bunch of CCP fans end up building a censorship-resistant social network that would totally be banned in China.
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.
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.
