Why not host a PieFed instance instead? Similar but more features and easier to maintain. Does have some scraper countermeasures built in, so maybe you don’t even need Cloudflare. Also as a next project after that, you could learn Python and contribute to the project.

Good question, mostly just cause I use Lemmy so wanted to stick with what I know more of at this point.

Yeah, being conservative isn’t how awesome new hobbies start. You need to leave your comfort zone 😂

Piefed had its own recent controversy lately. Leave yours? 🙃

Yeah, Some people here really love drama and to fight other people online, preferably on a personal level. PieFed has become target of that. I don’t think it necessarily means a lot, other than we’re some high drama online place. There wasn’t any one software vs another one involved.

But everyone is allowed to pick their favorite software. They’re both fine from a technical perspective. You’ll get some different perks, but it’s all the same Threadiverse. I myself like PieFed better, including which side of drama they end up on. But YMMV. If OP wants to start on a new journey, they’re entitled to do whatever they like. Main thing with side quests is to do something in the first place. That’s more important than the exact details.

(Btw, I’ve also been using Lemmy for quite a while… It’s not like I’m in my comfort zone all the time.)

You’ll regret that.

Thought about doing something very similar, I’ll be curious to hear the feedback and your experience

If at some point in the near future you step outside and hear a weird screaming sound echoing around the globe, that’s me.

Best of luck on your new hobby!

I didn’t see anything in your post that set off alarm bells

If you’re looking to save some cash and your ISP gives you a stable public address you could utilize a Dynamic DNS provider (ala duckdns) instead of registering a domain

Good point, that was purely a vanity issue: I have a specific name I want for my instance, and I wanted it to be as short a URL as possible so I was willing to spring for the domain. I’m not saying I’m doing all this just for the pun I have in mind, but I did spend far too long on that step of my deployment plan.

Best of luck to you!!! I just went through this last week and wow it was a challenge. I went the docker route not using ansible…and yah by far the worst install I ever went through of all the self-hosting projects I have setup…but my setup was largely complicated by the fact I had an Apache reverse proxy setup in front of the nginx proxy that has an example config provided…finally figured it all out, but yah fun times 😂 happy to help if you get stuck.

One of my earlier deployment plans had me using Ansible, then a bot aided revision had me remove it since I’m doing a single machine install and a fairly straightforward process. From my understanding I’ll get a better learning experience not using it so I figured that was better.

Yah i had never used it either, alot of the tutorials I found suggested it, and what threw me for a loop and was the ultimate Aha! moment for me was there is an ansible version and a non ansible version for the docker configs with different options in each, and the ultimate key thing I overlooked is on github, I kept using the “main” development branch which had changes that didn’t work with the stable .19 version. Switching to the .19 branch on GitHub and referencing those configs made it all click

Probably, yes, but I still love you

You sound like my wife.

Plot twist. You are not married…

Sure I am, but depending on how much of my free time goes into this we’ll see if it stays that way…

Cool man… I did the same last year, best decision ever.

Pretty easy too

Not lemmy, but piefed. The easy way, try yunohost.

You should not host anything that’s going to be public facing on your home network in 2026, period. Get a cheap German VPS and go nuts with it. There’s simply too much at stake opening up your home router/firewall for such little gain. Plus, being a residential IP behind NAT might just make it straight up impossible.

I host my own email and a matrix server. I would never think of exposing my home network to the internet. I use tailscale to get into the homelab, anything exposed to the net lives somewhere far, far away.

I also don’t get this fear. Assuming you aren’t blindly exposing your entire filesystem or opening tons of ports what is the risk?

How much RAM do you have available? Do you have an unlimited internet connection?

32gb, not unlimited but good enough that I am willing to proceed, then limit bandwidth usage through restrictive federation.

Great, that should be plenty! Smart to restrict, federation indeed results in a ton of traffic :D

I would not do that without first looking into applicable laws regarding legal liability for content and requirements to remove things. Depending on where in the world you are, this can be a minefield.

Yeah that’s a future line item if I make it far enough, heh. It’s under the “who to federate with” bullet point.

Especially because Lemmy devs don’t five a fuck about instance admins liabilities or gdpr

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material DNS Domain Name Service/System ISP Internet Service Provider NAT Network Address Translation TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server

[Thread #76 for this comm, first seen 11th Aug 2026, 19:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

We need more of this across all Platoforms for discovery and learning. Thank you!

Not necessarily, but why choose a project that needs interfacing with an existing ecosystem where it can mostly only be noise?

If you want to deal with a complicated mess of a system as a project, you could always grab Arch

I did a very similar setup very recently. Its not bad. I did try piefed first as some people suggested, but had some issues and it felt like it just wasn’t ready yet. I switched to self hosting lemmy and really like it. I also went with Brevo for email (I started with sendgrid, would not recommend).

Main difference for me is I am using cloudflare (they are my registrar and they allow me to deal with the CGNAT at no extra cost which you don’t have to deal with not to mention a pretty solid WAF for free tier). You may want to implement a WAF of some kind to keep the federation in check. I federate both lemmy and a matrix home server and it doesn’t eat up too much bandwidth.

I also like saving money, so a VPS is something I was trying to avoid. Personally, I don’t think the VPS does a much for securing your home network as people are trying to say here. It is another layer of security, but it’s not a panacea. Not saying I’ll never try it though.

Lemmy eventually plans on having an invite system, you could maybe use that when it comes out

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/4128

(You can also do this manually with the application questionnaire field and a spreadsheet)

Yes, you are, but aren’t we all?

Yes you are mad, I know as I did that over 3 years ago. Went from at home => a cheep VPS => paid for Oracle VPS.

If you go down the lemmy route (vs piefed) then I would deply with Lemmy-Easy-Deploy by @ubergeek77. this makes setting Caddy and mail simple

Good to know, I’ll take a look at those. Thanks!

up untill now I’ve not had too much bot traffic, but I’m betting hammered atm. Make sure to have some good firewall rules for when it happens:

check this out!

those ~2000 blocks were in the hour after turning on the full proxy, still getting a fair few from china hitting the real IP address that they must have cached.

Grep’d the logs and had 250,000 requests from china in the last 20 hours asking for full threads via the api

Huh. I hadn’t really thought too much about having to block that kind of traffic, I’ll add that to the list to think about.

Update with a link to your instance when you’ve done it so we can show some love and support

Just in general or because you’re setting up a Lemmy instance?

Well in general I know I’m an idiot, so for the moment I’ll just stick with Lemmy instance feedback cause that’s at least easier for me to address without expensive therapy.

allow additional users it will not be fully open

Just for trusted friends or randos? If randos, have you ever been a mod? Never set up a Lemmy instance, but I have been a mod of quite a few Reddit subs. It’s a headache I will never engage in again.

Not complete randos, but yeah it’ll likely be a very minimal group of people if at all. And I’m not looking forward to modding so I doubt I’ll go the route if having a lot of comms in my instance, but we’ll see what happens.

Alright man. Best of luck. Give it a go. You’ll never know how it will turn out unless you try.

Do it. You’ll learn something new. Maybe you’ll even contribute to the code.

Yes. Do PieFed.

Also, don’t do cloudflare. If you must use something, make sure it’s self hosted.

You’re an idiot of you don’t use PieFed instead 😃

oh very interesting. i’ve been wanting to get into the details of how federation actually works, and i wanted to figure out why mastodon<->lemmy federation does often not seem to work. but i guess that’s a deep rabbit hole too!

It does work! To an extent. It’s just not popular to do this… Because of the extent. No votes, easy to find threads, etc.

I keep considering the same thing, except only letting myself register so that I can have my own stupid instance name.

You will learn a ton. Also, you will spend a lot of money hosting an activitypub instance. I run a server for fun, and it’s about $40/month to handle the absolute firehose of assets I receive 24/7.

The only thing I’d say is look into whatever tooling and scripts people have made for removing CSAM from your instance. I messed around with a Lemmy instance for a bit, but when I heard about how hard it was to deal with the pedos, I got a little scared about inadvertently hosting CSAM and decided to shut it down. Since then I think I remember hearing about some better automated tooling for that kind of thing though so hopefully you can set that up.

There’s this specific issue, which is critically important, but also just content management generally.

I think micro instances are a real target for people with nefarious intentions - whether it’s porn, trolling, spamming, fascist groups, whatever.

The hardware and software aspects should be relatively straight forward. The real difficulty will be monitoring new communities, and users.

If it’s your own instance, with closed sign ups, shouldnt it only sync the content you subscribe too?

I mean, anybody can post anything anywhere, and it will get synced. Many communities aren’t even modded. But removing vile stuff is a burden to put on people to begin with, and I think most Lemmy instances are poorly equipped to deal with this automatically.

I would NOT host a Lemmy instance at home unless you’re going to obfuscate your IP address. If you make it public, you’re inviting any whackjob that sees your username to find your physical location. Additionally, I wouldn’t host it on a PC that you actually intend to use for day to day stuff, just in case the instance gets hacked and someone manages to escape the container it’s in. If you wanted to do this, I would put it on its own box with Cloudflare in front of it, otherwise you’re inviting trouble where there doesn’t need to be any.

I keep seeing “escape the container” mentioned like it’s a very common occurance. Is it really? I’ve looked up escape CVE’s and they seem to be few and far apart, they’re usually tricky to pull off, and when one comes out it’s a big deal and they get fixed right away (obv).

Actually my issue isn’t “do escape CVE’s exist”, it’s more like, should I really waste my time planning for it? It’s like planning for file permissions not to work, or logins to be bypassed.

I get that shit happens and why defense in depth is a thing but how do you defend from something so fundamental? If you operate under the assumption that containerization can be by bypassed, and virtualization can be bypassed, where do you draw the line and what do you do, run each app on a standalone physical box?

I would say that finding that balance is up to the individual admin and application, really, which is where the defense in depth comes in. Yeah, it’s rare, and if those exploits are being used it means you’ve got the attention of someone you probably can’t really stop, but it’s something to take into consideration. Bad configs can cause data leakage across container boundaries, too, so without knowing the admin’s skill level, I tend to recommend against sharing that hardware with something that might have something valuable on it. AI has made it easier for script kiddies to find zero-days and exploit APT-level vulnerabilities, too.

I probably wouldn’t host it at home, there are so many personal devices containing personal information on the network that I don’t consider the risks involved worth it. I would get a VPS, even if they’ve increased in price lately. If you do set it up at home, you will have to harden the server and the network, and that requires a lot of time, knowledge and effort. Just keep this in mind!

You can easily sequester your personal stuff from your self hosted stuff. Most traffic going anywhere is encrypted as it should be. The main concern is lateral movement hence the network isolation.

I think the bigger concern is someone uploading CP to it and then maybe having your house raided by the cops. Even if you completely separate your personal files from the lemmy server, the police are just going to seize every computer in the house. And the fact will remain that they found CP on your computer. The burden of proof then falls on you to prove that it wasn’t you who put it there.

its really easy to setup with yunohost if you’re lazy, idr if it was too bad to host lemmy, think having friendica and others was my issue that cause my 160gb to fill up in a few months, didn’t want to deal with it anymore lol

The problem is not the setup but the administration

So I’m discovering, heh. I got the instance up in a relatively short period of time, I’m spending far more time on email, domain, logging, backups, decisions, etc. I know I could just be a barebones “who cares about any of that” instance since it’s largely gonna be my own personal playground, but where’s the fun of that?

Honestly I could help you. If I had the time.