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:
That’s it, I think some political people need their own potato! Put them on an island and the only contact they have is liking their own comments and posts…
Federation is done per community?! Ok, this creates more questions:
Then why are instances defederating whole instances if they’re unhappy with the content of specific communities?
And more on topic: What about new communities? Do you need to manually federate with need communities on an instance? This seems like a hassle… How does e.g. lemmy-world do it?
Then why are instances defederating whole instances
That requires a little less tl;dr. What they were talking about was in regards to populating your feed with content from other lemmy/kbin servers communities. That’s one part of the federation going on behind the scenes. The other part is that lemmy servers are usually set up so they can federate with whomever by-default , just that they can’t know about any other lemmy server out there unless a user on that server specifically finds a community on another server and interacts there in some way. From then on they are federating server to server through those communities. The two are loosely related
The reason for the recent defederations from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works servers were due to bad actors (read trolls and hate speech) from those servers according to the behaw.org server admin. It could have been taken care of through moderator actions on the affected communities or by banning the bad-actors from behaw.org by the server admins, but the current lack of mod tools and lack of manpower of the mods there would be too much to take care of. The options for deferation on lemmy right now aren’t very fine-grained, so it was either tons of work on the moderation side trying to keep the beehaw communities safe for their users, or the nuclear option of defederation, which is what they ended up going with.
Feel like this is a bit long winded, but I hope I’ve helped clarify it a little at least.
Then why are instances defederating whole instances if they’re unhappy with the content of specific communities?
Because on a public instance with many users, any single user can put the URL to a community in the search bar and start the federation. Then it will start showing up on that instance’s “All” tab. If I go to lemmy.world right now and use their search bar to search for someweird.instance/c/among_us_porn, everyone will see those posts on “All.” Based on the name, most people probably don’t want to see that, so they’d be tempted to defederate.
Also, accounts belonging to users on other instances can comment on any public post on any instance, provided they haven’t been defederated. So defederation targets belligerent user accounts too.
What about new communities? Do you need to manually federate with need communities on an instance? This seems like a hassle… How does e.g. lemmy-world do it?
If you’re running a fresh new instance for yourself - yes. Larger instances like lemmy.world don’t have this problem because it only takes one person to start federation. If that one person starts it, every other user will just see it as another community and it will be pretty convenient.
Federation isn’t that complicated though. You just pop the link to the community in your search bar and you’re done.
Back in the day at least on Mastodon you can keep your instance unfederated, but I don’t know about Lemmy, it would be good some Lemmy project admins advice here.
I think “to federate” means to copy the “true” versions of posts onto your instance. So if your instance isn’t federated, you’re basically shadowbanned, i.e. you can write stuff (which is saved on your instance) but nobody sees it, since no other instance is copying it over.
I’d like to know that too. Do I have to mirror the whole fediverse in my personal instance?
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
EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103#issuecomment-1631643416
That’s it, I think some political people need their own potato! Put them on an island and the only contact they have is liking their own comments and posts…
Hard disagree, circlejerks and bubbles are bad for discourse
Federation is done per community?! Ok, this creates more questions:
Then why are instances defederating whole instances if they’re unhappy with the content of specific communities?
And more on topic: What about new communities? Do you need to manually federate with need communities on an instance? This seems like a hassle… How does e.g. lemmy-world do it?
That requires a little less tl;dr. What they were talking about was in regards to populating your feed with content from other lemmy/kbin servers communities. That’s one part of the federation going on behind the scenes. The other part is that lemmy servers are usually set up so they can federate with whomever by-default , just that they can’t know about any other lemmy server out there unless a user on that server specifically finds a community on another server and interacts there in some way. From then on they are federating server to server through those communities. The two are loosely related
The reason for the recent defederations from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works servers were due to bad actors (read trolls and hate speech) from those servers according to the behaw.org server admin. It could have been taken care of through moderator actions on the affected communities or by banning the bad-actors from behaw.org by the server admins, but the current lack of mod tools and lack of manpower of the mods there would be too much to take care of. The options for deferation on lemmy right now aren’t very fine-grained, so it was either tons of work on the moderation side trying to keep the beehaw communities safe for their users, or the nuclear option of defederation, which is what they ended up going with.
Feel like this is a bit long winded, but I hope I’ve helped clarify it a little at least.
It’s not long winded at all. Thanks for clearing things up for me!
Of course. Glad to help if I can
Because on a public instance with many users, any single user can put the URL to a community in the search bar and start the federation. Then it will start showing up on that instance’s “All” tab. If I go to lemmy.world right now and use their search bar to search for someweird.instance/c/among_us_porn, everyone will see those posts on “All.” Based on the name, most people probably don’t want to see that, so they’d be tempted to defederate.
Also, accounts belonging to users on other instances can comment on any public post on any instance, provided they haven’t been defederated. So defederation targets belligerent user accounts too.
If you’re running a fresh new instance for yourself - yes. Larger instances like lemmy.world don’t have this problem because it only takes one person to start federation. If that one person starts it, every other user will just see it as another community and it will be pretty convenient.
Federation isn’t that complicated though. You just pop the link to the community in your search bar and you’re done.
Thanks for explaining it! I think I understand now!
Back in the day at least on Mastodon you can keep your instance unfederated, but I don’t know about Lemmy, it would be good some Lemmy project admins advice here.
If you’re unfederated, doesn’t that mean you can’t see anything?
I think “to federate” means to copy the “true” versions of posts onto your instance. So if your instance isn’t federated, you’re basically shadowbanned, i.e. you can write stuff (which is saved on your instance) but nobody sees it, since no other instance is copying it over.
Truth.social (Trump’s social network thing) is an unfederated Mastodon. Basically, your instance is an island, but a fully functional island.
Oh i never knew that. And I thought they created their own code…
It mean the instance is isolated from the fediverse but people who register in that instance will be able to see the content in it.
Like some kind of private instance.