ubergeek77

Your instance will only clone new content after you’ve federated with a community. And it’s per community, not per instance.

It will also be generating thumbnails for websites that are linked, and a good chunk of the data requirement goes here.

I can tell you that, on average, my instance consumes about 700MB per day. I could cut that down if I federated with less communities, and I could get it down to 400-500MB per day (probably less) if I blocked my instance from generating thumbnails.

It’s not a lot, but over time it will add up. My instance is pretty new, and I have no idea what pruning options are available yet. I’ve got over a month before I have to worry about storage space at the rate I’m using it.

As for system requirements, as long as you’re not supporting users besides yourself, Lemmy will pretty much run on a potato.

TL;DR

• 400-700MB new data per day depending on your usage habits
• Whatever you want to run it on will probably be fine

EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103#issuecomment-1631643416

Someone in a comment shared this neat Lemmy server tracker that I bookmarked:

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/

“The server I registered with might go down” was the reason I made my own instance instead of joining a public one. It was easy, and now I only have to trust myself that the server will stay online, and that the server is up to date and built from the GitHub source without modifications.

Right now, if lemmy.ml goes down, anyone who used that as their “home server” won’t be able to log in or interact with Lemmy. So, one factor you might want to think about when joining an instance (or running your own) is, “What’s their uptime like?”

In a few days, and then on July 1st, we’ll also get to ask, “How well did ___ handle the Reddit exodus?”

I’ve had an issue where I was in a post and it “live refreshed,” changing the post entirely. Title, content, author, everything. Only thing that didn’t change was the comments on the post. It went back to normal after a refresh.

I think the main lemmy.ml instance is glitching out due to the insane new influx of users. I’m sure it will sort itself out as more people split off to other servers, and as Lemmy itself improves. Lots of attention is on their GitHub now which is fantastic.

This is my first time on any kind of federated network. It’s pretty neat. I’ve known about federated projects for a while, but with Mastodon being the most popular one, and with me never having an interest in Twitter to begin with, I never bothered.

I’m the type to want to run it myself instead of joining a public instance, and I have to say, this isn’t half bad at all. Wasn’t hard to set up, and isn’t as resource intensive as I was expecting.

I see a lot of potential in Lemmy, but I don’t think it can really “go big” without some significant, but hopefully manageable, improvements to how it works. You can read me ramble about my thoughts here. I’m crossing my fingers that the exodus from Reddit brings some extra attention to Lemmy’s GitHub.

Considering I went through the trouble of setting up my own instance but kept my usual name, I’m feeling just a little called out here…

The font size in Jerboa is way too big right now, it’s not a good experience. There’s an issue on their GitHub and apparently this is a bug in their markdown parser. I’ll give it another shot once they fix that, but for now, I just use my instance from a mobile browser and it’s not half bad. “Reddit bad” memes aside, Lemmy’s mobile UI is actually pretty good… unlike Reddit’s.