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.
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”.
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.
Do you think it would be possible to host using a raspberry pi 4?
How much traffic does Lemmy create daily?
I run lemmy.studio on a VPS with 1GB of ram and 1 VCPU, so a raspi4 should suffice, at least initially. Bandwidth is around 7.5 Mbps.
