Just started self hosting this instance. Nothing on the docs mentioned anything about storage considerations.
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Depends. If you have a lot of users posting a lot of pictures and you use pictrs out of the box config, then a lot. If you are just running a few users with finite communities being synced then a lot less. The number is going to vary a lot as lemmy grows and gets older so hard to document realistic expectations. But docker images are probably going to take up more disk space than actual contents unless you get quite big. I just threw my PG volume into a tgz to move servers and it’s less than a gig.
The lemmy.world admin said above that their instance currently takes up less than 100GB
My instance eats up almost 100MB everyday. It mostly depends on what your users subscribe to. It was barely growing on my first few days until I invited a couple of friends over to try it out.
lol lemmy died almost immediately after i posted this time to figure out what the hell caused that
it was because i set a damn server icon
lmao just how powerful is your server icon?
lol, yeah, that would crash any instance
(jokes aside, you’ll probably need to keep it somewhat low-res, and i’d also recommend cropping it to square. my instance uses a 128x128 icon)
Unless they changed all of the comment and post ids to bigints that’ll probably bring the site down before it runs out of storage. In defense of the lemmy developers they have been receptive to feedback, so I don’t think it’ll take long for that to be fixed if it hasn’t already.
How many
cans-of-beans.jpg
can you store?At least 3. Maybe 4.
Is there any way to purge old data?
I really hope it doesn’t get purged if lemmy is to be a Reddit replacement. A lot of the value Reddit had was obscure knowledge and making google searches actually usable.
I think as long as the original community the post is in doesn’t purge the data, it’s fine for other instances to purge if necessary.
Exactly, when dealing with big data, you need a strategy to archive old data. You can’t just store everything in one DB. Smaller instances may not feel like keeping all the date from all the time. Even big instances should have a mechanism to move old data do different databases.
Are you planning on donating to instances that don’t purge old data?
After hosting my own instance with just me for ca. 2 weeks:
1.99Gi pictrs
5.21Gi postgres
476M ./postgres 1.1G ./pictrs
After 3 weeks
How many users?
My instance has 13 users, and has been up for 2 months now:
1.5G ./pictrs 3.4G ./postgres
Holding onto all that data is pointless if you’re not selling it to someone.
Info is still useful for people doing google searches. It would be nice to be able to find common troubleshooting tips on Lemmy, etc.
Not everything posted here holds any value.
I disagree. One big hunk of value of a place like this is being able to look back at old threads. How many times did people say they always put “Reddit” in front of their Google searches to get the information they were looking for? This could be the same.
That’s a good reason for an instance to put “lemmy” in its url too, I imagine. Search engines are already returning Lemmy results for things.
That’s unsustainable. Why do you think the mainstream platforms are selling out?
It’s really not, at least for the text part. Text posts and comments take almost nothing and storage continues to get cheaper.
Mainstream platforms are selling out because they’ve always had others and shareholders who ultimately want to make money.
Small instance with about 3 users and myself online for about 2 weeks.
pictrs 930M postgres 1.4G
It depends on how many communities you end up pulling in. Your instance will only sync with communities that a user on your instance is subscribed to.
I’ve had my instance running for about 1 week and I’m the only user.
2.1G pictrs
2.5G postgres
This is my small instance with way fewer users than lemmy.world.
11G pictrs 5.2G postgres
Out of curiosity, how long has your instance been up? Just want to get a sense of how fast storage is increasing for you.
23 days.
How has your Lemmy experience been on a self hosted instance? I’m currently using lemmy.world and it’s very error prone, would self hosting reduce those errors at the expense of anything? Does federation take long or do you find you’re getting federated content quickly enough?
The experience has been pretty good, to be honest. No instability, easy updates, etc. I find federated content quite quickly, because I use this script to populate the “All” feed.
Thanks for the script!
I didn’t make it! :) I think, @[email protected] made it.
You won’t get any old content, so that’s a downside. You’ll only get content after you start federating. Unless someone votes or comments on old content.
Other than that the only downside is spending time maintaining and updating it.
My instance dormi.zone has been running for around 3½ weeks now, has a 3-digit amount of users and hosts a community with little more than 1000 subscribers. Here’s how much storage it currently takes up:
- 6.2 GiB postgres
- 4.9 GiB pictrs
In the default Ansible configuration, storage will mostly be accumulated by log files that are automatically generated by Docker and deleted whenever you restart the Docker containers.