Hi, I want to host a private Lemmy server under example.com mostly to be used without association (federation) with other Lemmy servers - this is due to the nature of the Lemmy server. It is going to be used only by people from a specific country, so in its initial phase, I am pretty sure these people won’t care about any other servers not in this country’s language. Anyway, that’s besides the point.
The thing is I already have a Hetzner instance where I have set up an NGINX server hosting a couple of PHP websites - Wordpress and Mybb forum using mariaDB database and php 8.1.
The instance is running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS - which method of installing Lemmy would make sense? Docker, Ansible, or from scratch, as it is documented here https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html ?
I just do not want to disturb my currently installed websites on this server.
Any recommendations?
First of all: Get the Instance it’s own VPS - Lemmy instances are very very fluid with their resources requirements and you don’t want the instance to bog down other services you use. Use another cheap VPS instance for your other services and link them up within Hetzner if needed.
This is even more the case if you host a public instance. I would even consider using separate accounts (even though Hetzner does officially not allow that) for that. Because if one of your users does something Hetzner finds ban worthy they will,under ideal circumstances, at least stop your VPS/quarantine it. (Been there) If you are really unlucky (CSAM material posted or federated in your instance) you will get your whole account banned. Which means all your other services are gone,too. (happened to someone I know)
Don’t get me wrong,Hetzner is great, I love them. But be aware of these points. They are very proactive when it comes to these points.
Beside that: Use Docker.
I did it for a year or so, exactly the same thing, I have a bunch of websites and other services like matrix, mastodon, peertube running on that server.
I found out the hard way that Lemmy is really not optimized for single user instances on a small VPS. In the beginning it was OK but the more they optimized for big instances like Lemmy.world and .ml the word it ran with few resources.
In the end it was so bad that it would Hogg all the servers resources and bring the whole server down every couple of hour so that I had to hard reboot it.
The worst part was that this impacted alł my other services and websites which went down with it every couple of hours. I tried to get a beefier server but that only helped until the next update.
In the end I switched to Piefed and couldn’t be happier. It uses a lot less resources as a single user instance so I could downgrade the server again and it’s written in python so I can much easier help working on it, no need to compile anything, etc. And it has a cool template engine which let’s you easily modify how it looks and feels.
I’ve looked at Piefed and I kind of actually wish it were compiled. I come from the Ruby on Rails world and while I love Ruby (and Hanami too!) I’m just tired of interpreted languages (and Python always feels clunky coming from Ruby).
I wish I had the free time to learn Rust or Go, but I would be ecstatic to find a Crystal-based Lemmy server. Maybe when I’m 80 I’ll have the free time to work on that.
I’ve been playing around with Go, I quite like it.
That seems to be the consensus but what keeps me from picking it up quickly is it always looks very low-level but I’ve been in Ruby land for far too long. 😆
I would really recommend just trying it out too (when RL time allows), all of the low-level stuff is often well hidden or not required to deal with unless you need it, well most of it is and everything having mostly one solution is a nice refresh compared to the hells of scripted languages.
- A long time python dev.
“Import-time” execution was a huge mistake.
If you want it to not affect other systems, a container is the obvious choice.
