Let’s say I decided that instead of blogging, I wanted to host my own Lemmy instance that contained a maximum of one (1) user– me, but allowing other users to subscribe.
To show what I’m talking about, look at how kaidomac uses Reddit as his own personal microblog, which people subscribe to.
What is the cheapest way to do this?
My mental model of Lemmy is that if I were to do this, the instance would still be caching information from other instances. This would– at least in my mine– add up in costs.
I’m a software engineer, so feel free to use technical jargon.
Selfhosting is basically free. You already have an unmetered Internet connection, and sourcing some hardware to run Lemmy would also be super easy.
The “problem” is that setting Lemmy up is quite annoying and complex and involves multiple docker containers and volumes and networks. There are various installation scripts but it is still a complete mess.
It would also result in a metric shit-ton of traffic and data storage.
The problem for me is I believe you need to open your network firewall for Lemmy and other federated services to work right?
Not really a fan of opening up more attack surface on my home network
Yes, of course. Or search for an external reverse proxy. Cloudflare offers something like this. (You set a Cloudflare server IP as target for your domain and then tell Cloudflare your IP and all traffic is routed over the Cloudflare ecosystem so your actual IP is not publicly used.)
I just opened port 443 and forwarded it to my Docker host and have NPM running there, handling all the forwarding to the individual containers, based on the request, but due to my day job I know what I’m doing :)
It also works through reverse proxies.
Is that not essentially the same issue as opening your firewall though? You’re still taking requests from outside your network into your network without any authentication until they actually hit the server
I’m not sure how much you’re willing to write off as “basically free”, but electricity does add up for running your own server.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200w*1 year *%240.14%2FkWh
$245/year assuming constant 200W load which is pretty reasonable for a small web server.
The trick is to have the server do other things like print, Plex, Piwigo, Samba, Shinobi, Frigate, Matrix, etc
It’s not just a small web server. It’s a dedicated server with full root access and 24/7 direct hardware access without any extra costs.
My Plex/*arr Intel NUC server uses like 50-75W under heavy load and maybe 5W at idle, and I can’t imagine it’s not powerful enough to run a small Lemmy instance, so even this figure seems a little high to me.
It depends on how powerful of a machine you need. My server only costs about $9.25/mo to run and it is way overpowered for the services I run on it.