.
Anyone is welcome to join my instance at endlesstalk.org. Its running on a pretty beefy server, so it can take a decent amount of users.
There are multiple frontends like lemmy.world and I have setup a seeder(lemmony), so the all feed should be pretty filled.
How powerful should my hardware be?
I think 512mb ram is probably a bit too low. There is a risk for the pc to crash at some point. I think 1 GB+ should be fine.
Which ports do I need opened to operate a lemmy instance for my personal use (i’m only going to be connecting from home)?
To avoid opening ports you can use Cloudflare tunnel as you mentioned.
Only other option is probably renting a cheap vps. Here is a cheap vps options for 2.5$
If you have the ability then self hosting is the best option
Otherwise I think instances with less users and content will be quicker, but then the all feed will probably be smaller.
I will also recommend my own instance endlesstalk.org. It is very small(10 users) and the server is located in Germany. Hopefully that is close to where you live, so the latency is low.
Photoprism
I’ll recommend my own instance at endlesstalk.org. There you can create a community, if you want. lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works might also allow creating of new communities, but I haven’t checked.
Usually, it is correct, that the all feed would be smaller on a small instance, but “seeders”, like lcs or lemmony can make the feed in all tab much larger.
It does this by subscribing to a lot communites. Lcs does for specific communities and lemmony subscribes to everything. You can see an example of an all tab with many subscriptions(added via lemmony) at my instance
I think the easist way to check, if an instance uses one of these seeders is to check the number of subscriptions in the instance. Or just ask the admin for the instance.
After hosting my own instance with just me for ca. 2 weeks:
1.99Gi pictrs
5.21Gi postgres
The internal path, I’m persisting is /mnt, but I also use an older version of pictrs(0.3.1). Think the newer version uses a different path.
I also needed to add the following for the pictrs container to work correctly.
securityContext:
runAsUser: 991
runAsGroup: 991
fsGroup: 991
For container orchestration, which is mostly what k8s provides, then you could use docker swarm or nomad. You could use docker-compose with multiple replicas of the wanted container + a load balancer to divide the load.
In general I don’t think k8s/k3s is needed for hosting lemmy yet, but since I have a setup for k3s, it is easier for me to use it.
I have only 1 container of pictrs running(with no scaling) and are using longhorn for storage, so if the pictrs container switches node, then longhorn handles it for me.
You can definitely have high availibillity without kubernetes, but its easier(For me atleast) with kubernetes.
My instance has 2 users. The domain name is endlesstalk.org
I host it on a k3s cluster with 2 nodes.
I selfhost PhotoPrism.
I use a folder sync app, to upload all my pictures from my phone to a directory on my server, which PhotoPrism imports from every 15 mins(Might be a bit more or less).
I have used it for a couple of years and it has worked fine for me.