this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Out of interest, is it better for server load to have new instances federating, or to have users using the instance directly? I assumed that the reliable way of handling this would be to run my own instance and keep it closed for friends I know in real life to use. I don't want to moderate a community, but I also like the reliability (and fun) of self-hosting, and knowing I can just stop using a server if their instance rules change to be against my own principals without losing my user history etc.
How does that mesh with what Lemmy is trying to do? I know I'm going to be in the vast minority here, but I'd like to know if I'm exacerbating load issues.
The load issues are because of users directly connecting to lemmy.ml. Federation isnt using many resources, so its best if users spread out across different instances.
What does it take to spin up an instance and federate? Can I just grab a docker image and go with some cloud Linux instance? What resources are we looking at for what headcount of users / level of engagement? (ie, posts and or connections per minute, etc)
@whitehatbofh @nutomic
I run a small instance for a few of our staff and a couple of rss/bot accounts.
I use a small DigitalOcean droplet that installs the software automatically. Very easy to run with a small number of people.
Running on a very small server. 4 GB Memory / 80 GB Disk . Works well.
I might not be your best example though
Thanks for the confirmation, glad to not be adding more than my fair share.
I am not an expert, but I think join lemmy suggested joining smaller instances and federating.
The issue is that some instances are having trouble federating. It took me a while to find my small community from lemmy.world - and when I did the upvotes and comments were all incorrect (many not showing up). Checked on beehaw and couldn't even find my community
This would make sense to me - I assume it's the equivalent of a single user seeing basically everything on a given community once, vs loading it from DB (or at least cache) for every request for each new individual user. Every time I load the front page on my server, it's just fetching stuff from my own instance, right?
EDIT: Looks like it does load things from other servers, but only images. Everything else comes from my own instance.
I'm considering hosting my own instance. Can you point me to where i can get started? I'm a noob.
You'll want to start here, but it depends how comfortable you are with self-hosting as to whether it'll be a walk in the park. I had good luck with it, but I self host a lot of stuff and know what kinds of pitfalls there are. The docs aren't totally up to par - I might take a look at contributing to improving them - so you may need to do some searching around if you have problems. There's a Lemmy Support community on lemmy.ml you could check out too.
Right-on, thanks! It helps just to have a little direction—even if imperfect. I usually seek out multiple sources, anyway.