Which to host for a single user instance: lemmy or kbin (or others)?
what is better for single user instance, or maybe something small like under 10 users (no communities)? which is lighter on resources? how much storage should I allocate?
any alternatives to lemmy and kbin that are still somewhat similar?
I was also looking into both but in the end I chose lemmy because I didn't want to deal with PHP.
Lemmy should be lighter on resources, since it's written in Rust.
Far, far lighter on RAM for sure. Less than half a gig for Lemmy, multiple gigs for KBin
Kbin is PHP app so you should be able to tune down idle worker counts to use less memory. Certainly not as low as Lemmy being a compiled rust app, but 500 MB of RAM usage should be achievable. As for CPU usage, I've been running a personal Lemmy instance and I'm impressed with how low the CPU usage so far, even after federating with dozens communities. Can't say the same about Kbin because I haven't actually run it myself, but PHP 8's JIT is very fast so I imagine it shouldn't use too much CPU as well.
@cyclohexane I think this should be merged today with a bit of luck: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/143
Really glad to see this, will make deployment much easier.
I'm definitely interested in seeing how the single-user instance offerings develop across the various federated applications. I have no interest in taking on the role of admin or moderator for people I don't know personally, but am more than happy to run my own front-end service that'll let me lurk and interact with all varieties of ActivityPub content.
For now it seems kbin might win that fight for me since it's equipped to handle reddit-style communities and threads while also providing a workable microblog interface. But it does seem to be a bit on the heavy side... I wonder if we might see some software created for this particular usage scenario one day, if it isn't already being worked on somewhere.
If big instances like Beehaw go whitelist federation only, it will effectively make single user instances useless.
Certainly a possibility, but I don't really expect it to be a common concern. Defederation is mostly about keeping problematic people out when an instance's admins either can't or won't resolve whatever problem is at play. Most instances will never even realize a single-user instance is lurking at all if they don't bother to crawl the logs and said user doesn't cause a scene.
I'd expect most whitelist-only instances will have been that way from the start instead of growing large and then shutting the door, because the goals of running an instance like that are fundamentally different.
The barrier to entry for making a new instance is relatively high compared to the barrier for entry for making an account on a free for all instance, so I doubt it will be an issue.
Right now they went the other way around, so the big instances are blocked and we with our single user ones can still federate with them.
I have had no success yet trying to run kbin behind traefik, so I am on lemmy right now. Works pretty well actually.
However I don't seem to be able to subscribe to kbin magazines. I can see lemmy sending out the follow message to the kbin servers' inbox, no error messages, but no activity from the kbin server follows up and it stays at 'subscription pending'.
Tried it with quite a few kbin instances. Does it work for someone else? Trying to find the reason why they do not like my lemmy instance.
I’ve been trying to debug this as well so it’s not just you.
However I don’t seem to be able to subscribe to kbin magazines. I can see lemmy sending out the follow message to the kbin servers’ inbox, no error messages, but no activity from the kbin server follows up and it stays at ‘subscription pending’.
Same here. I haven't been able to fully subscribe to anything on Kbin. Running my own lemmy instance and I get the magazine added as a community and get the magazine description but subscribing never returns anything. I re-try every once in a while but noting so far. I assume it will be fixed sometime in the future. I may just set up a kbin instance as well but I don't want to manage both.
I'm a PHP developer, I prefer PHP but I'm probably going to be going with Lemmy since it's more refined currently.
You could also have a look at Friendica: https://friendi.ca/
It has groups support that is compatible with Lemmy.
I really want to self-host Kbin, since I like the interface and approach of it a bit more than Lemmy. But since building the docker images failed on my Homelab, I spun up a fresh Ubuntu LTS 22 Server at my hoster and ran through the Admin Docs again... sitting here still after 15 Minutes it trying to build the PHP image and it does not seem to make any progress. I wish we could pull the images and run it without building them ourselves. But kbin is in its early stages, maybe someone will push built images to a registry in the future.
If this runs for another hour without any progress I guess I will call it a day and try Lemmy next.
While I quite enjoy the Interface of KBin over Lemmy. It seems Lemmy uses a lot less resources based on the "Admin Guides" for each service.
Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration.html
KBin: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/wiki#user-content-admin-guide
My Lemmy instance is currently occupying about 350MB of RAM, but you can round that up to 400MB. A lot less than the 4GB for KBin.Technically it's a dual user instance now, since a friend wanted to join it and I said sure.
Damn, this is so much worse than good ol' RSS for just following up stuff (which I imagine is the main argument to be made for a single-usee instance)
Thanks for the info! what about storage capacity usage?
Keep in mind as php-fpm (used by Kbin) launches multiple child processes instead of a single rust process like Lemmy. The number of child processes can be tuned down to reduce RAM usage if necessary.
Yeah, kbin seems to be a php8 service vs a compiled rust service from some lite poking.