this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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I need a new hobby, I'm going to set up my own Lemmy instance. Am I an idiot? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 weeks ago by AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Of the many useful things I could do with my spare time instead I'm setting up a Lemmy instance because why not. The scope of this is definitely greater than any self-hosting I've ever attempted, so please feel free to tell me just how much trouble I'm in. I'm just giving the broad strokes to see if I've made any crucial errors (other than deciding to do this at all).

And if this is a completely wrong place for a post like this or I'm missing data I'm supposed to include I apologize, I probably need a sanity check, in more ways than one.

First limitation, I'll be hosting it on an existing Linux Mint box acting as a file share mostly and occasional gaming PC/movie streaming box. Its hardware is overkill for this, I do not anticipate issues when it is in use. It receives regular updates and weekly reboots, instance will be set to automatically restart. NVMe with loads of space for local storage, RAID SSDs for data offload/backup.

Second limitation, I hate Cloudfare and Oracle. I do not want to use either of them.

Third limitation, money. Cheaper is better. I have a URL picked out and a registrar which will give me the cheapest long term option, in case I actually keep this thing going.

Last limitation, I'm already in over my head so I'll be relying on a lot of googling and probably some chat bots to figure things out as I go through the actual deployment process. What could go wrong?

So, Lemmy hosted on Linux Mint box using Docker containers. ISP is a good one for this I'm told, no CGNAT, largely stable public IP but I'll have a script running in case it does change. Confirmed ports 80/443 are open. Using Caddy for the HTTPS. Closed registration to start, if by some miracle I make it to actually wanting to allow additional users it will not be fully open, and I'll use Brevo for the email SMTP. Security wise I know I'm making it harder for myself by exposing my IP, I'm going to have UFW running and Crowdsec to help keep incoming bad traffic out.

Down the line I'll get Lemmy updates, backups, retention rules in place/automated, and make decisions on federation, etc. Thoughts?

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[–] Jimbabwe@lemmy.world 93 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Probably, yes, but I still love you

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 40 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You sound like my wife.

[–] Marthirial@lemmy.world 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Plot twist. You are not married...

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 33 points 2 weeks ago

Sure I am, but depending on how much of my free time goes into this we'll see if it stays that way....

[–] ianhclark510@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Best of luck on your new hobby!

I didn’t see anything in your post that set off alarm bells

If you’re looking to save some cash and your ISP gives you a stable public address you could utilize a Dynamic DNS provider (ala duckdns) instead of registering a domain

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

Good point, that was purely a vanity issue: I have a specific name I want for my instance, and I wanted it to be as short a URL as possible so I was willing to spring for the domain. I'm not saying I'm doing all this just for the pun I have in mind, but I did spend far too long on that step of my deployment plan.

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT
CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material
DNS Domain Name Service/System
ISP Internet Service Provider
NAT Network Address Translation
TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
nginx Popular HTTP server

[Thread #76 for this comm, first seen 11th Aug 2026, 19:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] ranslite@pie.dasneuland.de 13 points 2 weeks ago

Not lemmy, but piefed. The easy way, try yunohost.

[–] PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I would NOT host a Lemmy instance at home unless you're going to obfuscate your IP address. If you make it public, you're inviting any whackjob that sees your username to find your physical location. Additionally, I wouldn't host it on a PC that you actually intend to use for day to day stuff, just in case the instance gets hacked and someone manages to escape the container it's in. If you wanted to do this, I would put it on its own box with Cloudflare in front of it, otherwise you're inviting trouble where there doesn't need to be any.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I keep seeing "escape the container" mentioned like it's a very common occurance. Is it really? I've looked up escape CVE's and they seem to be few and far apart, they're usually tricky to pull off, and when one comes out it's a big deal and they get fixed right away (obv).

Actually my issue isn't "do escape CVE's exist", it's more like, should I really waste my time planning for it? It's like planning for file permissions not to work, or logins to be bypassed.

I get that shit happens and why defense in depth is a thing but how do you defend from something so fundamental? If you operate under the assumption that containerization can be by bypassed, and virtualization can be bypassed, where do you draw the line and what do you do, run each app on a standalone physical box?

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[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Just in general or because you're setting up a Lemmy instance?

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well in general I know I'm an idiot, so for the moment I'll just stick with Lemmy instance feedback cause that's at least easier for me to address without expensive therapy.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

allow additional users it will not be fully open

Just for trusted friends or randos? If randos, have you ever been a mod? Never set up a Lemmy instance, but I have been a mod of quite a few Reddit subs. It's a headache I will never engage in again.

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not complete randos, but yeah it'll likely be a very minimal group of people if at all. And I'm not looking forward to modding so I doubt I'll go the route if having a lot of comms in my instance, but we'll see what happens.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Alright man. Best of luck. Give it a go. You'll never know how it will turn out unless you try.

[–] Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 8 points 2 weeks ago

Cool man... I did the same last year, best decision ever.

Pretty easy too

[–] Steve@startrek.website 8 points 2 weeks ago

Maybe. Do it anyway?

[–] shadshack@feddit.online 7 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

The only thing I'd say is look into whatever tooling and scripts people have made for removing CSAM from your instance. I messed around with a Lemmy instance for a bit, but when I heard about how hard it was to deal with the pedos, I got a little scared about inadvertently hosting CSAM and decided to shut it down. Since then I think I remember hearing about some better automated tooling for that kind of thing though so hopefully you can set that up.

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[–] ohshit604@lemmy.halstead.host 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

My instance has been online for about a month, the supplied docker-compose.yaml was quite straightforward, had a little headache with Nginx but nothing overly complicated.

The long-con so to speak is federation, you have to subscribe to each community manually to begin federating with them, i have noticed timing issues with other instances such as Lemmy.world and have not been able to resolve them.

[–] joker54@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks ago

I'll write a script you can use to seed with top communities. I already have most the work done.

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[–] valar@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thought about doing something very similar, I'll be curious to hear the feedback and your experience

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

If at some point in the near future you step outside and hear a weird screaming sound echoing around the globe, that's me.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I would not do that without first looking into applicable laws regarding legal liability for content and requirements to remove things. Depending on where in the world you are, this can be a minefield.

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[–] BuckFutter@timeyak.com 5 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Best of luck to you!!! I just went through this last week and wow it was a challenge. I went the docker route not using ansible…and yah by far the worst install I ever went through of all the self-hosting projects I have setup…but my setup was largely complicated by the fact I had an Apache reverse proxy setup in front of the nginx proxy that has an example config provided…finally figured it all out, but yah fun times 😂 happy to help if you get stuck.

[–] tko@tkohhh.social 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not sure what your solution was, but I eliminated the reverse proxy from the official compose stack and configured my existing reverse proxy to point directly at the lemmy containers. It works well for me.

[–] BuckFutter@timeyak.com 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thanks. Yah that was what I tried to accomplish using Apache but couldn’t get the correct proxypass statements in Apache that would do the correct passing depending on the header received. Tried asking an LLM for help but never got it to work, so ended up doing a basic/straight pass through apache to a local VM running nginx as an outer proxy which proxy’s to the nginx internal proxy…its messy as all hell but it works 🤷

[–] tko@tkohhh.social 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't know enough about Apache to say one way or the other, but based on what you described, you SHOULD be able to get rid of the internal proxy. Since both the inner and outer are both NGINX, getting the settings right shouldn't be a problem.

But, on the other hand, if it works it works!

[–] BuckFutter@timeyak.com 2 points 2 weeks ago

Good call. Perhaps on a rainy day I’ll take another crack at it…but yah the ports are exposed through docker so yah, makes sense. Thanks and have a great day!

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[–] spirinolas@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

Yes, you are, but aren't we all?

[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 4 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Yes you are mad, I know as I did that over 3 years ago. Went from at home => a cheep VPS => paid for Oracle VPS.

If you go down the lemmy route (vs piefed) then I would deply with Lemmy-Easy-Deploy by @ubergeek77. this makes setting Caddy and mail simple

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[–] fartographer@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

I keep considering the same thing, except only letting myself register so that I can have my own stupid instance name.

[–] moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yes. Do PieFed.

Also, don't do cloudflare. If you must use something, make sure it's self hosted.

[–] DeadDigger@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The problem is not the setup but the administration

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

So I'm discovering, heh. I got the instance up in a relatively short period of time, I'm spending far more time on email, domain, logging, backups, decisions, etc. I know I could just be a barebones "who cares about any of that" instance since it's largely gonna be my own personal playground, but where's the fun of that?

[–] FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

Update with a link to your instance when you've done it so we can show some love and support

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 2 weeks ago

Do it. You'll learn something new. Maybe you'll even contribute to the code.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Lemmy eventually plans on having an invite system, you could maybe use that when it comes out

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/4128

(You can also do this manually with the application questionnaire field and a spreadsheet)

[–] ArborNode@lemmy.shutes.org 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I did a very similar setup very recently. Its not bad. I did try piefed first as some people suggested, but had some issues and it felt like it just wasn't ready yet. I switched to self hosting lemmy and really like it. I also went with Brevo for email (I started with sendgrid, would not recommend).

Main difference for me is I am using cloudflare (they are my registrar and they allow me to deal with the CGNAT at no extra cost which you don't have to deal with not to mention a pretty solid WAF for free tier). You may want to implement a WAF of some kind to keep the federation in check. I federate both lemmy and a matrix home server and it doesn't eat up too much bandwidth.

I also like saving money, so a VPS is something I was trying to avoid. Personally, I don't think the VPS does a much for securing your home network as people are trying to say here. It is another layer of security, but it's not a panacea. Not saying I'll never try it though.

[–] tko@tkohhh.social 3 points 2 weeks ago

I actually started on a VPS... I moved off because I was pegging the RAM and adding more to my plan was quite expensive. Performance is MUCH better on my home server with plenty of RAM.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Why not host a PieFed instance instead? Similar but more features and easier to maintain. Does have some scraper countermeasures built in, so maybe you don't even need Cloudflare. Also as a next project after that, you could learn Python and contribute to the project.

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Good question, mostly just cause I use Lemmy so wanted to stick with what I know more of at this point.

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[–] amio@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Not necessarily, but why choose a project that needs interfacing with an existing ecosystem where it can mostly only be noise?

If you want to deal with a complicated mess of a system as a project, you could always grab Arch

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