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.
Difficult to say. There will be a lot of new concepts to learn about. Easiest thing would be to spin up a VM and test in there.
Getting Lemmy up and running on my existing Docker infrastructure too about an hour, and only because there’s an undocumented restriction that I ran into that I had to google around. Adapting the docker-compose to my Traefik settings took about 5 minutes.
It will likely take you a bit more time to get started, but after that many sites run on without much maintenance. Perhaps not such a rapidly developing project like Lemmy, but Mastodon is fairly stable nowadays.