I’m not really tech savvy but can follow directions pretty well. I am trying to create a local lemmy instance for my country and want to contribute to the community with a local server.
Does anyone know which community would I join to get more info about this? Any guides that might be helpful for me? I would appreciate the help. Thanks.
!selfhosted@lemmy.world could be helpful
The lemmy docs have a version that sets it up via CDK. I would not do that as it’s needlessly expensive for experimentation.
Cheapest AWS option is set up an EC2 instance with an elastic IP, follow the wizard AWS gives you. Ubuntu OS will be the most accessible. Set SG to allow http (port 80)and https (443) from 0.0.0.0/32 and Ssh only from your IP address. You’ll need to generate a keypair as part of the setup. and then you’ll ssh in and follow any generic lemmy get started guide (probably the easy install script).
The free tier instance type will get you started but it’ll start giving you problems after not too long. Probably need to go up to like a t3.medium to avoid it occasionally freezing up on you.
I’m surprised no one has setup an AMI. I’m sure there are plenty of semi-technical people who wouldn’t mind spinning up instances but just don’t have the hardware to do it.
Theres already docker images and ECS/fargate. Im debating on putting together a whole terraformed kubernetes stack for other instances to use, it would be for larger instances though as the while stack might be close to $100/mo with costs going up automatically with scale. Every time someone runs an instance and it runs on a single box with no scaling or redundancy it makes me cringe a bit.
How are your Linux skills?
You’ll need a domain name to start. If you plan on hosting any communities, you’ll want to secure it as well, I’d recommend a cloudflare account, use their DNS proxy and then only allow traffic from cloudflare cdns so as not to expose your server directly. You’ll also want to configure the Web application firewall to block bots, known malicious IPs, that kind of stuff. To manage this, you’ll have to host your DNS in cloudflare and create and install an origin certificate on your host server.
If you are comfortable with Linux and command line (you’ll want to know at least the basics to get you by), then you can deploy via ansible. Lemmy has a nice little doc that mostly covers everything.
Feel free to ping me if you have some questions.
Oh and if you are having your instance send mail, you can use the service built in, but it’ll get flagged as spam. You’ll need either a SMTP relay service like sendgrid or SPF records so that receiving email servers can verify its coming from your domain.
Thanks for replying. Sorry it took so long to reply.
Most of my “linux” skills are youtube video based. I’m currently running a proxmox box that houses my OpenWRT, adguard, tailscale Home assistant and a Win11 VM for backing up to backblaze. I also have a Synology box.
Like I said, most of my ‘skills’ are following well documented youtube videos and guides.
I currently own lemmy.tw. I’m located in Taipei and was going to run it out of my proxmox or a spare Intel i3 serverI have laying around. My fear is that since my boxes are on the same network, I might be putting myself at risk. I could setup a VLAN to segment it out of my network. I just don’t want to lose all my data because of some lemmy bug and/or forgetting to update the kernals or something.
I don’t mind paying for a monthly subscription for hosting if that means its safer.
Thanks for the help.
