I’m looking to create a space for a small subreddit that I moderate that has maybe a couple hundred active users at most. I feel like the documentation provided here leaves a lot up to assuming the reader has prior knowledge of hosting a web service. I don’t have any such prior knowledge so I’m hoping I can ask here. Please bear with me as I fumble my way through asking questions about a thing I’m doing for the first time.

I am thinking this is accomplished with a computer set up at my location, like a tiny little AWS in my bedroom running by the sheer force of my internet connection, and the hopes and dreams for my community. Or am I completely misunderstanding what it means to host an instance?

-Does the local machine store files like pictures posted by users? If yes I assume this means I should build a computer with sufficient storage to meet this demand.

-Does the lemmy install via ansible require the local machine to run an operating system? Or does ansible fill that role? I’m assuming the former based on the documentation for ansible, and that it should be a linux distro but I’m dense, so I’m asking.

-Is it required that the instance be federated to and visible to other instances? I would like for it to be isolated and somewhat private.

-The local machine would be connected to my personal business ISP connection. Could the instance be traced to my physical location? If so, what would be necessary to mitigate that?

-Am I entirely out of my depth? I can follow a guide real well, and problem solve, I just have no experience.

Thank you for your time!

  • Kaiser Of None@mesita.link
    2·
    1 year ago

    This may be late but here’s my besto shot at answering, but to start I feel you should not be running your own instance, you should find one you like and have your community there. Instance administration and moderation are two different jobs.

    • yes all text, images and video is stored within your server

    • Ansible is a program that allows for automation of server management work, you have two computers, your work machine and your server. Your work machine has Ansible and all the configurations you wish to have, and ansible tells the server what to do to reach the desired state. Lemmy’s playbook (the set of ansible commands and configs) assumes the server has Ubuntu installed.

    • instances are set to be federated to everything by default, you can manually change that in the configuration to defederate from specific instances, or even ONLY federated with specific instances. Note that your instance only pulls data from other instances after it has to interact with them (so someone on your instance subbing)

    • all IPs can be traced sort of to a location, this is called GeoIP (maxmind offers a general service for that, you can check a few for free on their site). So yeah be careful about using your own connection for hosting anything. You can host on an AWS EC2 instance which will completely remove your connection from the equation, but we’ll you gotta pay for those.

    • you are asking good questions, you could have it be a learning experience but if you want safety I’d go with someone else’s instance and just hack around to learn on your own

    Good luck mate!