this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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That's the best part, it doesn't!
You're spot on, donations, or just people (like me) doing it ~~out of the goodness of their heart~~ for various reasons (free speech, desire for control/power, curiosity, boredom, lust for gold, being born with a heart full of neutrality, etc).
My server is mostly intended for me, but anyone who wants an account is welcome. My reasons are that I already run stuff on servers I have so cost is minimal vs what I would be doing anyway, I like having control over things I run (password manager, git server, etc), and based on some of the federation drama I saw in Mastodon (and has already happened here with beehaw) it's a good idea to run your own server.
Also, where can I start my own server for funsies? Ive got trueNAS, unsure if I can run it from there.
I probably can't help much when it comes to TrueNAS, all of my experience is running it on Docker in Linux. AFAIK there is no plugin/jail for it out of the box, the easiest would probably to run a Linux VM on it and follow one of the official lemmy install guides using either Ansible or Docker (compose). I am sure you could figure out a way to install it from scratch in a jail, but that is beyond my experience with BSD.
In addition to the setup of the server itself you'll want a domain, DNS, SSL and to figure out port forwarding (assuming your TrueNAS box is at home) at a bare minimum. Someone asked a similar question earlier and you can read a slightly longer response for these things [in my response to them in !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml](https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/126236). I also suggest there that a cloud provider like digitalocean or linode would probably be more reliable and easier for some things and could be done (in a way that supports at least a small instance) on a budget of <$10/mo.
If you have any questions or want a more opinionated answer as to how I would set it up let me know.
Oh and I like the suggestion for the digital providers. I currently have a local box but I'm open to anything really. Just need to dip my toes
Yeah, regardless of your choice you'll still need to buy a domain so I would do that first. Choose something you like, and look at all the fun different TLDs out there beyond just .com. Be careful though, some of them are trying to be exclusive so can be surprisingly pricey.
If you choose to do this relatively simply in a cloud provider... you can set up the domain to use their DNS servers (usually free) which would make things easier since most of the stuff you are doing for lemmy is all in one place. From there launch an instance (I would choose one of the ones priced around $10/mo and enable backups which costs another buck or two) and point your DNS at it. Then use the official ansible install method which will get you the rest of the way there, including taking care of the gruntwork of SSL/Let's Encrypt.
There are all sorts of different ways you could do this to make your stuff more reliable in case the machine on the cloud provider, disks, entire datacenter (it happens) has a problem, but this is reasonably robust, especially for such a low price point.|
Again, if you have any specific questions or trouble, let me know.
I will! Thanks!
Oh, one really important thing once you have Lemmy up and running is to make sure your instance is not set to open registration (have it closed or application-only), and if possible set it up to do email verification (which is a little complex since you need to set up your instance to send emails). There is a huge wave of bot signups happening. Captcha, application-based (or closed) signup and email validation were the only ways to fight back against this wave, and sadly the latest release of Lemmy removed the captcha feature as it was deemed ineffective and not friendly for accessibility reasons (e.g. vision impairments).