I’ve run linodes for years. My blog runs on them. I still host a variety of other services on them. They are good for everything from gaming servers to a blog etc.
They did get bought out by akamai a while back. And have raised their prices but they are still solid.
I am currently the only user. Im considering opening it up to limited users but not really having communities once i get a lot of the instances cached and indexable.
Others like @leopardboy@netmonkey.tech are running on a 2GB shared just fine. I will likely move to that if i choose to keep it solo for sure, or under 100 users and no communities.
I dont have the time to really moderate others or content on the instance. So i dont think I plan to host any communities at all. I do wish you could federate/sync specific communities to your instance to make searching/subscribing easier.
Correct. Connect to for example connect to lemmy.ml and pull their communities so it shows in your communities page locally. Dont have to sync the posts etc. Just the base stats (subs, post, comments. Basically exactly what this is doing. https://lemmyverse.net/communities
note: I hadnt seen that page until after my comment... But im getting a lot of 404's on specific communities, so i have to put in their ! name in search...spam that, click to open the community and subscribe.
That's exactly what I'm wanting to do. Just have myself and maybe a few others with limited communities. Would you recommend using ansible to setup a Lemmy on Linode?
Yes the ansible config worked fine for me. I worked for days to get an kbin instance up. Ansible worked first go.
I have yet to get email working but otherwise its solid. Linode will block email btw if you account is new (and frankly may be blocking mine now). You just have to put in a case and justify and it should be fine. My account should be old enough to be exempt but I will likely do it anyhow. Their support is pretty good.
Getting federation crawled and communities added is a bit slow. Mostly because the other instances are a bit slow.
A few pointers if you havent done admin yet.
Put nothing in the federation allow list unless you want to go whitelist only. Over time as other instances hit yours and you search others, the linked list of instances will grow. Just use the blocklist if you want to block certain instances. I havent found a good way to block the growing number of instances in case they have some illegal content like CSAM. So...i may just go whitelist anyhow
Searching for instances seems to be CPU heavy on mine. Its not a problem though. You just cant simply plug in a URL of a community in another instance if you havent linked. You will get a 404 if you do. So you have to go to search, looking for that community by hitting search a few times until it shows up, then you can join and it will start crawling
I have no idea what "Private instance" does other than i believe it will keep your instance form starting in the future if you have it checked AND federation turned on. I saw some logs in dockers startup when i did it but nothing in the UI.,
Thank you for the information. I've signed up for a 2GB shared linode and it's running Debian 11. I assume I need to ssh into it, then run the ansible stuff. I have very basic knowledge of Linux and command line. I am not entirely sure how to fill out the config but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.
I'm not super familiar with Linux, I've installed it on machines in the past, I know some very basic command line stuff. I've done raspberry pi stuff. I have a mini PC running Ubuntu right now that I am not using for anything so I can use that to run ansible. I probably won't be able to work on it until after this weekend but once I get an moment to set down and do it I will shoot you a message if I have any questions. I really appreciate your help and I am excited to be a part of the fediverse.
You can also use visudo to edit sudoers. The first like will require a password. If you use the second line, you can sudo without a password. I would only do the latter if you only use key-based auth though.
someuser ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
someuser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
I also edit /etc/hostname to my server name. Update and reboot. From there run through ansible instructions and make edits as necessary.