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Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent

daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

I have always thought of hosting a fediverse instance for myself.

I already have a server for personal usage, the technical knowledge and it would stop being a burden on other people’s servers.

Does anyone have experience with this. The federation system works fine with one person instance? Storage goes out to the roof?

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kernelle@0d.gs ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I’m running my instance for the same reason, it’s been running for over a year and I’m the only active user. Although there’s people passively using it as well.

Storage doesn’t go over 100GB much. The only downside I notice is a community on Lemmy is only federated if at least one of the users is subscribed to it. Using Lemmy-federate you can add a bot account that subscribes to new communities.

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rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
You don’t have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.

But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don’t need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.

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- daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  The thing is that I already have a server and a few Terabytes of unused storage. So that would not be an issue. As long as storage doesn’t en up adding that much. I know that the fediverse protocol likes to replicate storage among all servers involved in an interaction. Though I wonder if it would be possible to safely erase old data, specially if I’m just hosting it for myself. I need to investigate on that.
  
  But for the other costs I already have a server running 24/7 on my house and several Tb of Storage.
  
  And I also need to investigate how are the normal federation politics with one person instances. If it is like trying to host an email server would be hell as you’ll get mark as spam by a lot of providers.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    No, federation is a lot easier than setting up an email server and 500GB of media storage should be enough for a long time for Lemmy. For the microblogging side, it will depend on how many media-heavy people you follow. If you follow hundreds of photographers, you will need to clear your remote media every once in a while.
    
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oranki@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I haven't tried an OG Mastodon server, but currently running a GotoSocial instance, just for me.

With mostly the default retention etc. settings, the instance takes at most a couple gigs of storage space. If some image has been rotated, it will be refetched if you view the post again.

As for Federation, a single user instance is probably not a good idea if you're just starting with the Fediverse. Only content from accounts a user on your server follows will reach your server, including posts boosted by the people someone follows. I was already following about 150 accounts when I set it up, so I didn't really notice much difference in the home feed.

OG Mastodon can utilize relays, which will help with the lack of content.

For following topics, I made another user that follows some hashtag bots from fedi.buzz. The bots boost all posts with specific hashtags, so the posts reach my server.

If I were to do this again, I'd probably go with full Mastodon instead of GtS, just because I like the UI. There are other niceties too.

I think there's no way to keep the same domain while changing the underlying server software, without breaking federation. If someone knows a way I'd be really interested.

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ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I’ve run a couple single-user Pleroma and Akkoma instances for 1 to 3 years each, one of them with a lot of follows in both directions and plenty of multimedia, and it worked fine on hardware 6 generations old on a crappy Comcast plan proxied thru a $4/mo VPS.

Other platform software (Mastodon especially) consumes vastly more compute resources than the Pleroma family. I haven’t tried self-hosting Lemmy yet. YMMV.

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