It should be noted that Feddit.org was included to represent Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
I did not include Baraza.africa as that was too encompassing as it covers the whole African continent.
Hopefully this post inspires more countries to join the blue club!
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 want one for my country, and I want to validate that users are in fact people from my country. Once inside, they can do pretty much whatever they want. We aren’t going to be a lot of people at the start for sure. What would you recommend me?
If you’re dead set to run lemmy - then just do it! If soam becomes a problem - turn on registration verification. Spam usually comes in waves, so you don’t even have to keep that barrier on all the time. Having said that - if you want some sort of nationality verification - application process could enable it.
If you’re not set on lemmy - give piefed a shot. That’s what I would run if I were setting up from scratch. Same format social media, but, at least from what I’m hearing - better software.
I wasn’t aware of piefed, looks like it federates with Lemmy just fine. Maybe I grab a generalist fediverse domain for my country and have sub domains for lemmy, piefed, mastodon, and see what resonates more in my country.
Thank you for your insight!