this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023

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Lemmy on a raspberry pi (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Does anyone run their own Lemmy instance on a pi? How was the process of setting it up? Were there any pitfalls? How is performance?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Im looking at setting up a lemmy instance on a rpi3 with cloudflared tunnel! I'm curious to see if anyone else has done this and how it was.

Edit: I'll give it a whirl and hopefully post an update from my new instance later!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Please don't forget to give us updates on your adventure^^

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was able to get it setup, main things to watch out for:

Don't use the provided docker compose file. Or more precisely don't build from source and lookup the correct image tag on docker hub first.
The documentation was a bit confusing. This isn't really specific for the Pi but since I was creating a compose file from scratch some of the steps listed didn't quite explain all of the details.

I only used it for testing purposes, but performance was fine (on a Pi4 4gb). Note I only ever had one user.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

As I only want to use it for myself as jump-off point (and to mess around a tad) I'm fine with performance on an RPi4 (have the 8 GB version), but I'm struggling to get it next to the rest in my Debian install on it.

Local install fails as I need imagemagick 7 (Debian still had 6.9), and it refuses to compile with imei method. (that script wants to use /usr/local/bin/identify which I think it needs to install itself (part of imagemagick) and the compose file I couldn't get to work with an external (already hosted) postgres.

Any tips? I'm totally new with docker and ansible.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I don't think there should be any problems, lemmy is a fairly lightweight web application, it's compiled so no big overhead of some runtime like ruby in case of mastodon. I haven't tried it on a raspberry Pi, but on my server the load is always just around 0.1

The only bottleneck I could think of was Postgres, but I've been running postgres on raspberry pies without any problems before too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not yet, but I'm planning to. And I don't think there will be any "pitfalls" at all other than your microsd dying in a couple of months rather than years due to it getting hammered constantly by API requests, etc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You could plug in a USB SSD or HDD and make sure the DB and other regularly written data goes there. That would pretty much remove the problem.

I would wonder how well it would perform. The limited memory and cpu power surely would make database access not great under even moderate load.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

You are right -- I completely forgot about those, thanks.

I would wonder how well it would perform.

Something between "usable" to "a complete nightmare" -- depending of how popular the lemmy instance is. Which would scare new users away, leaving it as a "cool kids only" thing. Then again, theres the fact that the power draw is little to none, which is very important regarding most self-hosting stuff -- "can't use it if I can't maintain it".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey OP, I'm on a similar journey (except I'm using an rpi kubernetes cluster)

I don't have advice but I do want to wish you good luck

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here: my daily "simply a nice stranger" award goes to you

[+] [email protected] -12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What user cap would a pi have running an instance?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you asking me what i plan to set the cap to? I guess just me. I cant see anyone else wanting to run off a pi from my house and there are so many other instances to join.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m a newbie here but what would be the benefit of running an instance just for yourself?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The ability to host your own data - both for privacy, and insurance that the instance you host your account in won’t suddenly disappear.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I would also add that Lemmy is part of the fediverse, meaning it is federated. Federation means all instances "talk" to all instances (unless they defederate), so you aren't limited only to the content on one instance (or in some cases not even Lemmy, case in point: I'm posting this from my kbin.social account).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

same!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What happens to posts/comments and any media/content that is hosted on a server that just goes away (for example if I created one virtually and then deleted it or if a sdcard on a pi is corrupted)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If you upload an image to that server, the image will be gone. Your comments will still exist on other federated instances, assuming that instance was federated in the first place. But any replies to those communities will not propagate once the hosting instance is offline.

For example assume you have 3 instances, A, B, and C. You have an account on A and create a post to a community on A. At some point A goes away, but those posts and that community will still exist on B and C. So you create a new account on B, and reply to one of those posts... users on C won't be able to see those replies as A isn't there to broadcast those replies out. And if someone on C creates a new post on that community from A, you wouldn't be able to see it on B either.

P.S. The same is true if A just decides to defederate instead of shutting down. (other than the images and accounts would still exist obviously).

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

That, and somehow I think it's nice to be able to federate with a username within your own domain when you have one. (or multiple, decisions, decisions, which one to pick ;) )

[+] [email protected] -11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, I meant what is the user limit based on the power of the raspberry pi tech specs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically the limit would be the speed of the database and the drive it runs on. If you connect a SATA SSD via usb3 it shouldn't be too bad. Can't tell you exact figures but a few hundred users is probably ok if you don't expect the site to be super responsive.

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