I wanna look into self-hosting my own Lemmy instance some time. Once I have more time to figure it out with my home network local server w/ public cloud VPS OpenVPN server setup (likely with Docker containers too) I’ll take a look into it. You’re right, it’ll likely be fun and right up my alley too.
Does Lemmy automatically grab all content from all federated servers, or does it only grab the content from communities you (and any other users on the instance) are subscribed to/are actively being visited?
I’m not so sure it does copy all content in the background.
My instance will be for me only, I will be the only person on it and it will be closed for registrations. I won’t be responsible for anyone else’s data on my instance, nothing for me to be concerned about.
By control, I mean I can back up my data and ensure my comments, subscribed communities, messages, etc are all available to me no matter what, I don’t have to rely on some external third-party managing it for me.
I wanna self-host my own instance so I have more control over my data.
Ooh, that’s a really good idea, I need a federation helper bot/account when I start self-hosting a Lemmy instance!
It is? TIL, that’s pretty interesting.
Awesome, that was just as straightforward as I was hoping it was, thanks! I am more familiar with MySQL as I haven’t used Postgres a ton but SQL is SQL after all lol
Could you share the cron/script you use to do this? I’m interested in hosting my own Lemmy at some point, and having a script for that cleanup would be hugely helpful for me.
Wow, I’ll definitely look into this, thanks! Even if I don’t use it, it still may be useful just reading through it.
Honestly, I have both, but that’s because redundancy is amazing. Generally, DIY is more involved and thus more fun, but if you just want boring set-it-and-forget-it data backups, a pre-built NAS is a better option.
Good to know, thanks!
I also asked ChatGPT because I was curious, and ChatGPT said since I am using a VPN, when my home server makes outbound requests, they will first go through the VPN tunnel and emerge from the VPS which means that to external systems (like the servers receiving my federation requests), the source IP will appear to be the public IP of my VPS, not my home IP.
Very cool stuff! It makes sense that VPNs can be used to mask home IPs even in this way, since VPNs are literally designed for security and privacy lol
i’ve decided against hosting lemmy at home because there’s no way to setup a proxy for outbound connections (or i couldn’t find it) so any federation request your lemmy instance makes reveals your home IP to owners of that particular instance.
Wait, how would that work? If I’m using OpenVPN, would it not be using the source and/or destination IP as my OpenVPN client IP, and not my home IP? After all, OpenVPN is completely bypassing my routing and NAT from my home connection, and it just tunnels traffic through the VPN instead.
I believe the source IP would be the IP of any server trying to contact my server, and then the destination IP would be my VPN client IP because of the DNAT rule I have on my VPN server (say 10.0.0.2) so it would not expose my home IP, or is that not correct? If both Lemmy and Nginx are either using a local docker IP (not on my home network), or the OpenVPN client IP from tun0, how would they even be aware of my home IP?
Are you saying I’d be exposing my IP if I tried my home-based VPN port forwarded setup? I am pretty sure it wouldn’t be exposing my home IP, but maybe I am mistaken.
I’m planning on self-hosting an instance (and some other web apps) on my local server at home, but over a VPN on a public VPS. I feel like that’s gonna make an overcomplicated setup even more overcomplicated lol
Yep, making federation decisions myself is why I want to spin up my own instance at some point, and I have spare computing resources as is already lol
I’m a PHP developer, I prefer PHP but I’m probably going to be going with Lemmy since it’s more refined currently.
Well that’s interesting, and somewhat like I expected but not really, I am surprised the setup process for kbin is that broken, although I guess it does make some sense since kbin is that much newer.
Oof, yeah, requiring someone to use Arch definitely seems like a steep requirement lol
I’d maybe be interested in trying out self-hosting Mastodon at some point too, good to hear that Lemmy was easy to install though. I’m not too worried since I have quite a bit of Linux experience, I figure it probably won’t be too bad to setup whatever social media instances I’m interested in checking out.
Yeah, I’ve heard of people using cron jobs to automatically clean activity older than 3 days.
I’m not sure what can be done about image staking up a lot of space, I imagine that’ll take up a ton of space after a while. Not sure how that could be cleaned up safely.