I am fairly new to Lemmy and was thinking of getting an account on one of the “big” servers to get the full experience, but then I figured I could do exactly the same thing as with my GoToSocial and other services: run my own instance.
I am wondering if this is an overkill or not. Any experience running your own small Lemmy instance? Are there better options that are compatible with Lemmy but lighter to run for this purpose?
It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Honestly I want to host a Lemmy instance and my own peertube instance.
Two things are stopping me. I don’t understand certain points of how things interact in the software or how to set it up properly to self host and be comfortable in it’s security. I barely understand docker and some other stuff. It sucks because I understood how to use DOS at an around 14 by reading the manual. I also don’t have the funding to do so in a way that I would feel comfortable at this point. I don’t fully trust co-mingling my home services with web services due to the security risks.
Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)
But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.
YuNoHost is a great alternative, but if you really want to learn, I would instead recommend really spending some time learning Docker; you don’t have to understand how to build your own images (although that is also very useful), but mostly what is going on at a high level, and then switch to Docker Compose. These days it is extremely easy to run very complex architectures with a single compose file.
You also don’t need to make it public for your tests, you can always start with local ip addresses and you own computer, or if you have a small computer that can run headless, then you can setup your experiments in there.
This is like the opposite of what you want to do for complex software - don’t add more abstraction, or you won’t know what to do when stuff goes wrong!
Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You’ll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that’s somehow needed for software M on python x.xx… Of course you’re then not going to learn about these things. It is not “bad”, though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it’s easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one’s weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times…
I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.
I will have to take another look. I’ve seen it before but didn’t see anything about Lemmy and such.