I am a software developer by craft and a linux system admin by hobby. I cannot commit to moderating and managing my own instance, but I would be glad to help someone with the technical aspects.
The most common complaint I saw in Reddit and here about switching to Lemmy is the difficulty of setting it up, so I thought I would help bridge this gap.
While I have never hosted my own instance before, I already checked the setup guide and it looks pretty simple to me, so I am confident I can do it. Please feel free to comment or DM.
It would be great if you can comment general questions. I can then respond to you here and maybe others will see it and know how to host their own instances too.
I feel like there’s a lot of money on the table for the first person to set up a turnkey hosting platform for Lemmy. Something like MoltenHosting but for Lemmy instead of Foundry.
Being a highly technical guy, I struggled to get everything running on the server that I am hosting other things on. The biggest hurdle was letsencrypt, but other things weren’t working quite right. I ended up just paying for a new ubuntu vps so I can run the ansible playbook (I use arch linux everywhere else). That turned out to be super simple and “just worked”.
An up to date step by step instruction for docker, ansible, or scratch setup would be a fantastic step in the right direction. I’m not a complete moron, but I feel the current guides are lacking. There’s a lot of assumptions on the admins knowledge of the associated systems beforehand. As someone else said, the first to make a turnkey solution… hot dog. Would absolutely blast adoption into space.
I was playing with the idea of spinning up a VPS through AWS lightsail since the bundled package it provides seems to be cheaper than configuring an EC2 instance/other requisite resources running 24/7.
What has been people’s experience regarding:
- Monthly data upload rates (since most cloud providers charge internet egress per gigabyte)
- Database/image storage requirements
Thanks for offering your knowledge! I successfully set up and instance using their docker installation guide. However I was never able to get the smtp server to work. I first tried to add postfix to the docker-compose file like they have in the ansible installation example on github, but that didn’t work. Just trying to add an email address to my account would stall the UI with a spinning animation on the Save button. I then tried to update the hjson config file by adding my sendgrid api credentials and removing postfix from docker compose. That gave me the same result. At that point I kinda gave up and deleted my vps. I don’t have access to my error logs anymore, but I can spin up a new vps to try to get the same errors again if needed.
Amazon has a very generous free tier for outgoing email in SES, and it is pretty easy to set up.
