I am fairly new to Lemmy and was thinking of getting an account on one of the “big” servers to get the full experience, but then I figured I could do exactly the same thing as with my GoToSocial and other services: run my own instance.
I am wondering if this is an overkill or not. Any experience running your own small Lemmy instance? Are there better options that are compatible with Lemmy but lighter to run for this purpose?
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Running “my” own single user instance here.
Great! Love it! The whole idea.
Me two!
For how long and how do resource usage and storage space used look by now?
Disk space 10gb, CPU/ram not noticeable on my server (lots of other services using more than Lemmy).
I think it’s been up about one year. One user but I subscribe to all communities I find remotely interesting.
Thanks for the reply. So what kind of magnitude are we talking on the RAM usage here? Some people here talked about not being able to fit it inside 2G total. So I assume it’s probably like hundreds of megs which is only really significant in such low memory configurations.
My server has 48gb ram and in top Lemmy doesn’t appear even in the 0.1% memory usage.
My instance runs great… I’ve got it on NVME drives and a system with 64GB of RAM. When I was hosting it on Digital Ocean, I often ran into performance issues with RAM (I think I just had 2GB). Since the switch it’s been rock solid.
I am running them on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM and a 2TB NVMe SSD. Loving it.
as a single user lemmy, no
AS a ex single lemmy user, yes. I use PieFed instead. Background: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed
would be nice if it’s possible to use mlmym with piefed… luckily it seems like boost and voyager now works tho
Yes join the dosins of us 🥧
I mean you jest, hence upvoting, but I also find it funny that more people use PieFed now than are on lemmy.ml (edit: to explain, that is by far the most talked about instance across the entire Threadiverse). On PieFed.social alone there are >1k active users.
I run a single user PieFed instance for a month now. Compatible with Lemmy. Everything runs smooth so far.
I run a single user instance and it’s horribly slow. Mostly because I only have HDDs and not enough RAM to compensate. I hope Lemmy 1.0 will increase database performance.
Piefed is supposedly much more performant. But I’m shying away from migrating because I don’t want to lose my post history and uploaded pictures.
Maybe there’s a way to import contents through federation? Just, if both run on the same hardware when doing it (possibly the new instance on a subdomain), both would run way slower.
Canceling all subscriptions would probably make Lemmy use almost no resources.
I run dullsters.net which is sort of a single user instance. Nobody else can make accounts it’s strictly for one community.
Directly compatible with Lemmy, there’s Friendica (Facebook-like; also compatible with Twitter-like posts e.g. from Mastodon), Mbin (simplified/cleaner UI; also hybrid like Friendica), and PieFed (apparently more Reddit-like than Lemmy from what I read, in a technical sense).
Dunno which are better/worse to run, but I remember seeing hardware requirements on the docs of each of them.
Also it’s not uncommon to see single user instances from my experience. But if you feel it’s a waste of domain/resources, you could also create some dedicated community or something to give further use for it.
Also on the images issue pointed by another user, maybe also see if Lemmy now has a solution for it, or if any of the alternatives do.
The solution is to not proxy images. Might even be the default by now. That’s a huge resource hog. No idea what pictrs is doing but it’s still taking up a whole lotta space just for my own images.
Tangencial comment, but as I’d presume your instance is running on a Linux server (usually sites are), maybe check with ncdu (if available) which folders are the biggest?
I have heard from others who have done this that the storage space for the content will fill up incredibly quick unless you keep it disconnected from federation.
Ah, good catch. This is something I have to look into. Other self-hosted apps I have usually keep a local cache for a few days only and fetch on demand when needed. Need to explore if both Lemmy and PieFed to something similar.
Lemmy fetches everything that has ever been posted in any community that any user on that instance is subscribed to and keeps it indefinitely.
Since most activity happens in big communities that most people are subscribed to, most instances keep full, persistent copies of most things that were ever posted to lemmy.
That’s why Lemmy scales so badly. If Lemmy was the size of Reddit, every instance would have to have storage capacity in the same order of magnitude as all of Reddit itself.
The problem only gets worse with time, since all that has been posted still remains.
The total replication also means that the copies need to be moderated by every instance individually, since every instance stores a copy of everything. So if e.g. someone posts illegal content on another instance and your instance stores a replica, you are just as legally liable for that illegal content as the original instance. Thus you have to moderate everything that runs over your instance.
Moderation effort is thus also replicated across all instances.
That bad scaling in storage and moderation is btw the reason why e.g. lemm.ee shut down. It was just too much cost and work to keep the instance running.
As far as I can tell PieFed already handles deleting old content (1 week by default, but I’m looking at the code on my phone so not the best way of doing research). I’ll do some more code reading later if I have a chance.
Hi, single user lemmy instance here. I’d say it’s been smooth sailing for now. I might consider moving to piefed like other folks here, but I’ll keep it and see. Right now i can’t even upgrade due to arm64 docker images are broken at the moment, but it’s sufficient enough.
EDIT: Seems like it’s fixed, yippee :D https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6201#issuecomment-3693373333 kudos to mattlqx :)
How much storage is it using?
~3GB according to postgres, ~545MB for the pictures. Not too bad actually.
That’s pretty good!
So, what is/are the advantage(s) of running a single user Lemmy instance? Privacy? Security? Anonymity? Curious since it seems there are people who do.
Immunity to defederation drama
Honestly, privacy and security. I can purposefully disable registration, I have my own data purposefully and anonymity, plus eliminating trusting a third-party server admins, etc.
i am considering spinning up a piefed boi, which at the most, would end up with maybe 5 users.
we’ll see!
Also might be worth thinking about what else you are self hosting. Don’t want to self host all of your communication apps; that would be brittle.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HASS Home Assistant automation software LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping k8s Kubernetes container management package
[Thread #982 for this comm, first seen 5th Jan 2026, 18:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’ve thought of doing it for privacy and other reasons. I don’t have the sense that the resource load is high, but I haven’t checked carefully.
I did it for a while and it was a fun little technical project but once the pictrs image cache exhausted the amount of storage I got in the cloud host service’s free tier, I stopped because I didn’t feel like spending money on it
