Out of curiosity I’m currently considering to self-host a Lemmy and a Mastodon instance. Just for me (and maybe 2-3 close friends) privately. The proposition of having full control over my social media sounds appealing to me.

However, I’m not a software developer and I have next to no experience in self-hosting anything. Also, I don’t plan to make self-hosting a hobby of mine.

Given these circumstances - how much time investment do you think is needed to keep everything running smoothly. I wouldn’t mind spending 1-2 hours a week, but if it’s more like 1-2 hours a day, I would stay clear.

Also, are there resources for troubleshooting available? I found the installations guides and some seem to be quite good for a layperson, giving step-by-step advice, however where to go if it doesn’t work?

I’m trying to make up my mind if it would be worthwhile to try or if I set myself up with wasting a lot of time :) So, any advise is welcome.

  • Dandroid@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’m a software engineer, I have taken classes on docker, I host my own web pages, etc. and I STILL can’t get it my own instance of Lemmy running. The instructions are unclear. They have bugs in their docker-compose.yml file. It’s really bad. I have been working on it after work each day for the past 4 days. So far I got the UI working, but i can’t log in or create an account. And I had to disable logging to get it running because I was getting an error with how the logger was defined in the yml file.

    And because I was frustrated, even though I really, really didn’t want to, I tried using their ansible setup. It still didn’t work, and it completely fucked my server. It took me a few hours to undo all the shit it did.

    It’s not in a good state right now. Hopefully they fix it soon.

    • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 years ago

      I STILL can’t get it my own instance of Lemmy running. The instructions are unclear. They have bugs in their docker-compose.yml file. It’s really bad.

      It’s a whole mess, yes. Also they want to create random containers and random volumes all over the place with random IDs for names and by default suggest messing with upstream files and configuration before creating the containers.

      I hope the devs will one day provide a proper container with environment variables for configuration.