Your instance will only clone new content after you’ve federated with a community. And it’s per community, not per instance.
It will also be generating thumbnails for websites that are linked, and a good chunk of the data requirement goes here.
I can tell you that, on average, my instance consumes about 700MB per day. I could cut that down if I federated with less communities, and I could get it down to 400-500MB per day (probably less) if I blocked my instance from generating thumbnails.
It’s not a lot, but over time it will add up. My instance is pretty new, and I have no idea what pruning options are available yet. I’ve got over a month before I have to worry about storage space at the rate I’m using it.
As for system requirements, as long as you’re not supporting users besides yourself, Lemmy will pretty much run on a potato.
TL;DR
400-700MB new data per day depending on your usage habits
Whatever you want to run it on will probably be fine
EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:
That’s it, I think some political people need their own potato! Put them on an island and the only contact they have is liking their own comments and posts…
Federation is done per community?! Ok, this creates more questions:
Then why are instances defederating whole instances if they’re unhappy with the content of specific communities?
And more on topic: What about new communities? Do you need to manually federate with need communities on an instance? This seems like a hassle… How does e.g. lemmy-world do it?
Then why are instances defederating whole instances
That requires a little less tl;dr. What they were talking about was in regards to populating your feed with content from other lemmy/kbin servers communities. That’s one part of the federation going on behind the scenes. The other part is that lemmy servers are usually set up so they can federate with whomever by-default , just that they can’t know about any other lemmy server out there unless a user on that server specifically finds a community on another server and interacts there in some way. From then on they are federating server to server through those communities. The two are loosely related
The reason for the recent defederations from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works servers were due to bad actors (read trolls and hate speech) from those servers according to the behaw.org server admin. It could have been taken care of through moderator actions on the affected communities or by banning the bad-actors from behaw.org by the server admins, but the current lack of mod tools and lack of manpower of the mods there would be too much to take care of. The options for deferation on lemmy right now aren’t very fine-grained, so it was either tons of work on the moderation side trying to keep the beehaw communities safe for their users, or the nuclear option of defederation, which is what they ended up going with.
Feel like this is a bit long winded, but I hope I’ve helped clarify it a little at least.
Your instance will only clone new content after you’ve federated with a community. And it’s per community, not per instance.
It will also be generating thumbnails for websites that are linked, and a good chunk of the data requirement goes here.
I can tell you that, on average, my instance consumes about 700MB per day. I could cut that down if I federated with less communities, and I could get it down to 400-500MB per day (probably less) if I blocked my instance from generating thumbnails.
It’s not a lot, but over time it will add up. My instance is pretty new, and I have no idea what pruning options are available yet. I’ve got over a month before I have to worry about storage space at the rate I’m using it.
As for system requirements, as long as you’re not supporting users besides yourself, Lemmy will pretty much run on a potato.
TL;DR
EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103#issuecomment-1631643416
That’s it, I think some political people need their own potato! Put them on an island and the only contact they have is liking their own comments and posts…
Hard disagree, circlejerks and bubbles are bad for discourse
Federation is done per community?! Ok, this creates more questions:
Then why are instances defederating whole instances if they’re unhappy with the content of specific communities?
And more on topic: What about new communities? Do you need to manually federate with need communities on an instance? This seems like a hassle… How does e.g. lemmy-world do it?
That requires a little less tl;dr. What they were talking about was in regards to populating your feed with content from other lemmy/kbin servers communities. That’s one part of the federation going on behind the scenes. The other part is that lemmy servers are usually set up so they can federate with whomever by-default , just that they can’t know about any other lemmy server out there unless a user on that server specifically finds a community on another server and interacts there in some way. From then on they are federating server to server through those communities. The two are loosely related
The reason for the recent defederations from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works servers were due to bad actors (read trolls and hate speech) from those servers according to the behaw.org server admin. It could have been taken care of through moderator actions on the affected communities or by banning the bad-actors from behaw.org by the server admins, but the current lack of mod tools and lack of manpower of the mods there would be too much to take care of. The options for deferation on lemmy right now aren’t very fine-grained, so it was either tons of work on the moderation side trying to keep the beehaw communities safe for their users, or the nuclear option of defederation, which is what they ended up going with.
Feel like this is a bit long winded, but I hope I’ve helped clarify it a little at least.
It’s not long winded at all. Thanks for clearing things up for me!
Of course. Glad to help if I can