Wondering if running a single user Lemmy is an overkill
I am fairly new to Lemmy and was thinking of getting an account on one of the "big" servers to get the full experience, but then I figured I could do exactly the same thing as with my GoToSocial and other services: run my own instance.
I am wondering if this is an overkill or not. Any experience running your own small Lemmy instance? Are there better options that are compatible with Lemmy but lighter to run for this purpose?
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Jeena
in reply to Erick • • •Lemmy and my Switch to PieFed; Threadyverse software alternatives
jeena.netmichael
in reply to Jeena • • •OpenStars
in reply to michael • • •I mean you jest, hence upvoting, but I also find it funny that more people use PieFed now than are on lemmy.ml (edit: to explain, that is by far the most talked about instance across the entire Threadiverse). On PieFed.social alone there are >1k active users.
1 PieFed stats
2 Lemmy stats
Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
piefed.fediverse.observertermaxima
in reply to michael • • •hexagonwin
in reply to Jeena • • •okr765
in reply to Jeena • • •squirrel
in reply to Erick • • •guynamedzero
in reply to Erick • • •like this
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fleem
in reply to guynamedzero • • •guynamedzero
in reply to fleem • • •bjoern_tantau
in reply to Erick • • •I run a single user instance and it's horribly slow. Mostly because I only have HDDs and not enough RAM to compensate. I hope Lemmy 1.0 will increase database performance.
Piefed is supposedly much more performant. But I'm shying away from migrating because I don't want to lose my post history and uploaded pictures.
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DaGeek247 likes this.
Auster
in reply to bjoern_tantau • • •bjoern_tantau
in reply to Auster • • •PriorityMotif
in reply to Erick • • •mbirth 🇬🇧
in reply to Erick • • •Lemmy's Image Problem (Updated 02-06-2024) - Lemmy
lemmy.mlnull
in reply to Erick • • •Valmond
in reply to Erick • • •Auster
in reply to Erick • • •Directly compatible with Lemmy, there's Friendica (Facebook-like; also compatible with Twitter-like posts e.g. from Mastodon), Mbin (simplified/cleaner UI; also hybrid like Friendica), and PieFed (apparently more Reddit-like than Lemmy from what I read, in a technical sense).
Dunno which are better/worse to run, but I remember seeing hardware requirements on the docs of each of them.
Also it's not uncommon to see single user instances from my experience. But if you feel it's a waste of domain/resources, you could also create some dedicated community or something to give further use for it.
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DaGeek247 and abeorch like this.
Auster
in reply to Auster • • •Also on the images issue pointed by another user, maybe also see if Lemmy now has a solution for it, or if any of the alternatives do.
mbirth 🇬🇧
2026-01-05 14:07:22
bjoern_tantau
in reply to Auster • • •Auster
in reply to bjoern_tantau • • •bjoern_tantau
in reply to Auster • • •abeorch
in reply to Auster • •Auster likes this.
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Auster
in reply to abeorch • • •RSS's a big for me and had been considering originally using Mastodon + RSS Parrot. But though I don't like the UI of Friendica, its native tracker bot function sounds rather interesting. 👀
Thinking here, the site engine I'd pick for daily use would probably be Mbin. But as I hear it is a bit of a processing hog, running it and a Friendica instance on the same device would maybe be too much for the device, so maybe I should buy another Raspberry Pi or some other SBC for it.
ShellMonkey
in reply to Erick • • •Two9A
in reply to Erick • • •I'm hosting the Decronym bot on a single-user instance, and it's a real pain. The bot's been down for weeks, actually, because an upgrade failed with some obscure error around the database schema...
I've ended up just today, wiping the whole thing and starting over, losing all data and having to refederate the bot. So yeah, I wouldn't recommend.
[Acronyms to help the bot re-establish: LVM, HASS, k8s]
linuxguy
in reply to Erick • • •Erick
in reply to Erick • • •Thanks for all the feedback!
I’m going to take a look at PieFed, maybe run both in parallel for a few weeks and see which one fells better 😉.
OpenStars
in reply to Erick • • •Scheduled maintenance for server upgrades next weekend (completed) - SLRPNK
slrpnk.netfleem
in reply to Erick • • •i am considering spinning up a piefed boi, which at the most, would end up with maybe 5 users.
we'll see!
webghost0101
in reply to Erick • • •I have tried snac before as a minimalist fediverse server but the blog style layout isn’t really for me.
I have also considered wether a personal Lemmy is a good idea or not.
kokomo
in reply to Erick • • •Hi, single user lemmy instance here. I'd say it's been smooth sailing for now. I might consider moving to piefed like other folks here, but I'll keep it and see. Right now i can't even upgrade due to arm64 docker images are broken at the moment, but it's sufficient enough.
EDIT: Seems like it's fixed, yippee :D github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issu… kudos to mattlqx :)
Fix ARM release builds
Nutomic (GitHub)YurkshireLad
in reply to kokomo • • •kokomo
in reply to YurkshireLad • • •YurkshireLad
in reply to kokomo • • •irmadlad
in reply to kokomo • • •aeshna_cyanea
in reply to irmadlad • • •like this
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kokomo
in reply to irmadlad • • •solrize
in reply to Erick • • •Decronym
in reply to Erick • • •Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #982 for this comm, first seen 5th Jan 2026, 18:25]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Imran Nazar ~ عمران نزر (@Two9A@hachyderm.io)
Hachyderm.ioShimitar
in reply to Erick • • •Running "my" own single user instance here.
Great! Love it! The whole idea.
desentizised
in reply to Shimitar • • •Shimitar
in reply to desentizised • • •Disk space 10gb, CPU/ram not noticeable on my server (lots of other services using more than Lemmy).
I think it's been up about one year. One user but I subscribe to all communities I find remotely interesting.
desentizised
in reply to Shimitar • • •Shimitar
in reply to desentizised • • •Bobby Turkalino
in reply to Erick • • •MuttMutt
in reply to Erick • • •It's something I've wanted to do for a while. Honestly I want to host a Lemmy instance and my own peertube instance.
Two things are stopping me. I don't understand certain points of how things interact in the software or how to set it up properly to self host and be comfortable in it's security. I barely understand docker and some other stuff. It sucks because I understood how to use DOS at an around 14 by reading the manual. I also don't have the funding to do so in a way that I would feel comfortable at this point. I don't fully trust co-mingling my home services with web services due to the security risks.
hendrik
in reply to MuttMutt • • •Maybe try something like YunoHost. That's a web server Linux distribution. And it's supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You'd need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn't the only option to help with the set up.)
But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.
YunoHost: garden your own piece of the Internet!
yunohost.orglike this
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MuttMutt
in reply to hendrik • • •Jade
in reply to hendrik • • •hendrik
in reply to Jade • • •Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You'll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that's somehow needed for software M on python x.xx... Of course you're then not going to learn about these things. It is not "bad", though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it's easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one's weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times...
I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.
Erick
in reply to hendrik • • •YuNoHost is a great alternative, but if you really want to learn, I would instead recommend really spending some time learning Docker; you don't have to understand how to build your own images (although that is also very useful), but mostly what is going on at a high level, and then switch to Docker Compose. These days it is extremely easy to run very complex architectures with a single compose file.
You also don't need to make it public for your tests, you can always start with local ip addresses and you own computer, or if you have a small computer that can run headless, then you can setup your experiments in there.
pedroapero
in reply to Erick • • •GreenKnight23
in reply to pedroapero • • •fuckin gross!
witness_me
in reply to GreenKnight23 • • •PostgreSQL is a goated database. It’s rock solid.
No clue why you’d find it gross. I’ll take it over MySQL, OracleDB or MariaDB any day.
Erick
in reply to pedroapero • • •pedroapero
in reply to Erick • • •🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮
in reply to Erick • • •Erick
in reply to 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 • • •squaresinger
in reply to Erick • • •Lemmy fetches everything that has ever been posted in any community that any user on that instance is subscribed to and keeps it indefinitely.
Since most activity happens in big communities that most people are subscribed to, most instances keep full, persistent copies of most things that were ever posted to lemmy.
That's why Lemmy scales so badly. If Lemmy was the size of Reddit, every instance would have to have storage capacity in the same order of magnitude as all of Reddit itself.
The problem only gets worse with time, since all that has been posted still remains.
The total replication also means that the copies need to be moderated by every instance individually, since every instance stores a copy of everything. So if e.g. someone posts illegal content on another instance and your instance stores a replica, you are just as legally liable for that illegal content as the original instance. Thus you have to moderate everything that runs over your instance.
Moderation effort is thus also replicated across all instances.
That bad scaling in storage and moderation is btw the reason why e.g. lemm.ee shut down. It was just too much cost and work to keep the instance running.
Erick
in reply to squaresinger • • •fodor
in reply to Erick • • •Erick
in reply to fodor • • •Psythik
in reply to Erick • • •I always wanted to do this too so I could have whatever I want after the at symbol in my username, but gave up after I couldn't figure out what "Docker" was because the last time I tried to run a website was sometime around 2001. A lot has changed since then.
Hell, just trying to keep my website secured with HTTPS alone is a major pain in the ass, because the certificate keeps expiring every few months and I can't figure out how to get it to stay activated long term. And don't even get me started on this "CNAME/@/AAA" business. It barely makes sense to my old ass! Whatever happened to just pointing your nameservers to your domain and being done with it?
neidu3
in reply to Psythik • • •I was in the same boat, so I'll leave you with this golden nugget you probably want to check out:
certbot
Erick
in reply to neidu3 • • •Even better: Caddy.
As simple and easy to run as nginx, and has built-in cert management.
Erick
in reply to Erick • • •And now running both Lemmy and PieFed side by side (OP, posting from my PieFed account).
I think admin wise I am going to stick with PieFed. Definitely liking it more!
eru
in reply to Erick • • •but it is kind of resource intensive