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.

  • pe1uca
    2·
    2 years ago

    It took me a day or two to setup everything for my selfhosted lemmy juggling my day job hehe, I’m guessing it can take a none experienced person one weekend to deploy lemmy in a VPS with docker. After that I’ve just connected to it to upgrade from 0.17.3 to 0.17.4 and I’ll have to update to 0.18.0 when it comes out.

    Be sure to set up properly your firewall and follow any security recommendations (they should mostly be one time configurations).

    For troubleshooting, google is your friend (or similar search engine). You can also hop into any chat the project may have (matrix, discord). Or you can post in communities specific for the problem you know you’re having, or general ones like in here when you’re lost.