Modern tech, retro tech, 80s/90s music & nostalgia. I live in northern England so most things I post about have a UK slant.
Elsewhere on Fedi:
systemd [is] a niche
Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn’t systemd-based unless you’re deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.
what if I’m not using CoreOS?
Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It’s essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.
I haven’t run up my own Threadiverse server yet, but I self-host my own one-person Mastodon, also on Hetzner. Yes, it will eat up a lot of disk space, so if you’re trying to keep costs down you need to send all the media to S3-compatible storage. I use Backblaze B2 which costs me something like $2/month for 200GB of Mastodon media.
I would assume Lemmy or Kbin would also be greedy for asset storage, as they’ll pull in media (images and videos) for any community you follow. So again pushing that all off to a low-cost storage system such as S3 makes a lot of sense.
The developer of kbin, @ernest, has said that automated processing of account deletion requests is on the roadmap but currently it’s a manual process.
As you can imagine, for a piece of software that two months ago was in alpha status with fewer than 100 regular users and then suddenly became one of the most-used systems on the Fediverse, there are still a lot of rough edges to be cleaned up.
I can’t help with Lemmy, but I’ve been running a single-user Mastodon instance for almost a year now.
Like you, I found that the media very quickly used up much more disk space than I anticipated. There are a few things you can do.
You can tune how long media is stored for: some of this is done in the admin interface, but really you need to set up cron jobs to regularly run various tootctl commands. This is the crontab I use:
SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/home/mastodon/.rbenv/shims:/home/mastodon/.rbenv/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
RAILS_ENV=production
# Remove media attachments older than 8 days
11 19 * * * cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove --days 8
# Remove link previews older than 28 days
22 5 * * * cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl preview_cards remove --days 28
# Remove files not linked to any post
3 23 * * 0 cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove-orphans
# Prune remote accounts that never interacted with a local user
44 1 * * * cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl accounts prune
You can of course choose even stricter settings but I found that no matter what I did, given that I am following approx 1,000 other Fediverse accounts it still used up more disk space than I was comfortable with.
So I offloaded most of the media storage onto an S3-compatible service. It’s breaking the self-hosting ethos somewhat, but with Backblaze B2 I can happily store and serve several hundred GB of media files for just a couple of dollars a month. To me, that was a no-brainer.
It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.
Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”