Setting up is easy, but keeping it up to date is often troublesome. Releases are far and few between and as such, whenever there is one, it includes a lot of changes. That leads to some instances having trouble pretty much every time; I’ve been on the unlucky side enough times to be wary.

Lemmy.cafe runs on 2 dual vcore 4gb ram VMs on digitalocean - one for db, another for lemmy itself.

Lemmy prides itself in being written in rust, but it leaks memory like a sieve - I’ve had split up the containers into smaller tasks (there’s an official flag you can pass to it), double them up and set memory limits. That way when something gets killed by the kernel it’s not really noticable to the end user.

Running a public instance of anything is a security concern, let alone alpha-beta software like lemmy. If you do run it on your homelab at home - at least get the cheapest vm in the cloud to hide your home IPs. You’d probably need to set up a wireguard tunnel to ensure outgoing federation does not reveal the IPs to other instances.

Instance level moderation is up to you. Don’t be too dreamy - nobody will join your instance just because you have it running. Other than spammers and voting bots, that is. Moderation tools are just not there, so you’ll have to fiddle in the db directly.

Having said all that - if all you want is a personal inatance - go for it! With sign ups disabled it’s a much less stressful experience!

I’m trying to use simplex, mainly for the instance’s chat. 2 things to say:

• notifications work perfectly even without play store
• every device has a separate account - I can’t reuse the same one. Not the end of the world, but it’s really annoying