Looking to maybe self host my own instance, I’m still learning about the fediverse. If a different instance that I federate with hosts something illegal are there risks to me? Is anything from other instances hosted on my server like a copy of it? Or would I only end up hosting things my users post? I’m paranoid and sorry if this is a silly question.
How much disk space would some need to plan for a small lemmy instance?
Well, here’s my first post on the fediverse!
Background in IT and server administration here. I however do not know much about the intricacies of the fediverse, but am interested in learning. Here’s my two cents based on a background of LAMP stacks for web hosting.
The required space would likely scale and vary greatly depending on how much content is hosted locally. Assuming minimum space similar to a basic LAMP server it’d likely have starting space requirements of less than 1GB. If local content is primarily text/links to content hosted elsewhere it would take a lot to drastically change that space requirement. Image hosting can vary greatly depending on size, quality, and number of images. Video hosting is an absolute space hog even at fairly low resolutions by today’s standards.
Bandwidth requirements would scale similar to storage requirements.
Other specs would also start very low if fediverse requirements are similar to a LAMP stack. Cores are typically more important than core speed in web server hosting as each request will try to use a separate core, but doesn’t need much processing power to provide that request since the server isn’t actually rendering anything.
Likewise, you shouldn’t need much memory on a web host. Will scale with the number of scripts running on the host but I suspect that shouldn’t be many unless you’re also running moderation bots, but those should ideally be run on a different server instance.
That said, I’d also be curious to hear from other people that have experience with the fediverse though and other recommended specs to potentially host an instance.
If anyone has other questions I’m happy to try to help :)
Where i live there is “the hoster privilige” hosters dont have to remove user content, only of somebody reports the content to you
The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote a pretty good blog post on the legality of the Fediverse, around the time Mastodon was getting popular. It probably applies to Lemmy too. It’s worth a read to familiarize yourself of what kind of legal things you’ll be getting yourself into. You’re on the right track; you can control you and your friends’ content, but you can’t control remote content that gets pushed to your server and that’s the part to worry the most.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer
One thing that stood out is to register yourself as a DMCA agent. It costs $6 or something. Having an agent on record gives instance admins certain protection.
Text is copied to your instance’s database, but any images are hosted on the other instances and simply linked to. Worst case scenario, you get told to delete something that’s illegal in the country in which you host the instance, you comply, and everything’s peachy.
Edit: That being said, I’m currently hosting an instance for myself and a few friends, and it’s been smooth-sailing. Just make sure to require email verification or admin approval for new sign-ups (or disable them entirely) if you don’t want to be overrun with bots.
