Thx in advice.
You store what is in your instance, and some content of another instances, according to your instance settings (in Friendica you can control what is stored in your instance, how much in megabytes for cache…), but in general you only need storage for content that you follow, and a bit more for public timeline content, but is not needed a copy of the fediverse in your instance.
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
- 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:
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…
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 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.
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.
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.
