this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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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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[–] MuttMutt@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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@palaver.p3x.de 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] erick@piefed.erick.sh 3 points 6 days ago

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.

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