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?

  • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vipEnglish
    31·
    2 months ago

    As others have already said, piefed is much lighter than lemmy, and is what I’m running as well, my instance isn’t necessarily single-user, (anyone’s free to join), but there’s only one other user on my instance

      • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Disk space 10gb, CPU/ram not noticeable on my server (lots of other services using more than Lemmy).

        I think it’s been up about one year. One user but I subscribe to all communities I find remotely interesting.

        • desentizised@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Thanks for the reply. So what kind of magnitude are we talking on the RAM usage here? Some people here talked about not being able to fit it inside 2G total. So I assume it’s probably like hundreds of megs which is only really significant in such low memory configurations.

  • squirrel@piefed.kobel.fyiEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    I run a single user PieFed instance for a month now. Compatible with Lemmy. Everything runs smooth so far.

  • Björn@swg-empire.deEnglish
    11·
    2 months ago

    I run a single user instance and it’s horribly slow. Mostly because I only have HDDs and not enough RAM to compensate. I hope Lemmy 1.0 will increase database performance.

    Piefed is supposedly much more performant. But I’m shying away from migrating because I don’t want to lose my post history and uploaded pictures.

    • Auster@thebrainbin.org
      4·
      2 months ago

      Maybe there’s a way to import contents through federation? Just, if both run on the same hardware when doing it (possibly the new instance on a subdomain), both would run way slower.

  • Erick@lemmy.erick.shOPEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    Thanks for all the feedback!

    I’m going to take a look at PieFed, maybe run both in parallel for a few weeks and see which one fells better 😉.

  • linuxguy@lemmy.gregw.usEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    I run a more-or-less single user instance. It’s fine. Not the fastest page-loads but otherwise NBD.

  • tko@tkohhh.socialEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    My instance runs great… I’ve got it on NVME drives and a system with 64GB of RAM. When I was hosting it on Digital Ocean, I often ran into performance issues with RAM (I think I just had 2GB). Since the switch it’s been rock solid.

  • ShellMonkey@piefed.socdojo.comEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    Have run Lemmy and now Piefed, it’s nice to have things customized to your wants, but probably wouldn’t bother if it was setting up a host just for that.

  • Two9A@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I’m hosting the Decronym bot on a single-user instance, and it’s a real pain. The bot’s been down for weeks, actually, because an upgrade failed with some obscure error around the database schema…

    I’ve ended up just today, wiping the whole thing and starting over, losing all data and having to refederate the bot. So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend.

    [Acronyms to help the bot re-establish: LVM, HASS, k8s]

  • Erick@piefed.erick.shEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    And now running both Lemmy and PieFed side by side (OP, posting from my PieFed account).

    I think admin wise I am going to stick with PieFed. Definitely liking it more!