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Hosting Lemmy experience (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 months ago by nachitima@lemmy.ml to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I’m considering starting a Lemmy instance with a limited federation model, and one of the things I’m thinking about from the start is how to support and maintain it as it grows, while spending as little attention as possible on the technical side of infrastructure management itself.

Because of that, I’m especially interested in hearing from admins who host Lemmy instances, particularly larger ones. I’d like to understand what your actual workflow looks like in practice: how you organize administration, what methodologies you use, how you handle backups, data recovery, upgrades, monitoring, and infrastructure maintenance in general. I’m also interested in whether there are any best practices or operational patterns that have proven reliable over time.

From what I’ve found so far, the official Lemmy documentation on backup and restore seems reasonably good for small instances, but as the instance grows, more nuances and complications appear. So ideally, I’d like to find or assemble something closer to a real guideline or runbook based on practices that are actually used by admins running larger instances.

If you run or have run a Lemmy instance, especially one that had to scale beyond a small personal or experimental setup, I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience. Even brief notes, links to documentation, internal checklists, or descriptions of what has and hasn’t worked for you would be very useful.

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[–] kat@lemmy.blehiscool.com 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I run a modest Lemmy instance (lemmy.blehiscool.com). It’s not on the scale of lemmy.world or anything, but it’s been around long enough that I’ve had to deal with some real growth and scaling issues. I’ll try to focus on what actually matters in practice rather than theory.

Infrastructure

I’m running everything via Docker Compose on a single VPS (22GB RAM, 8 vCPU). That includes Postgres, Pictrs, and the Lemmy services.

This setup is great right up until it suddenly isn’t.

The main scaling issue I hit was federation backlog. At one point, the queue started piling up badly, and the fix was increasing federation worker threads (I’m currently at 128).

If you run into this, check your lemmy_federate logs—if you see:

“Waiting for X workers”

that’s your early warning sign.

What Actually Takes Time

Once your infrastructure is stable, the technical side becomes pretty low-effort.

The real time sink is moderation and community management. Easily 90% of the work.

On the technical side, my setup is pretty straightforward:

  • Auto updates: Watchtower (with major versions pinned)
  • Monitoring: Uptime Kuma
  • Backups: Weekly pg_dump + VPS-level backups

Backups are boring right up until they aren’t. Test your restores. Seriously.

Where the Gaps Are

The main gaps I’ve run into:

  • Pictrs storage growth Images from federated content add up fast. Keep an eye on disk usage.

  • Postgres tuning As tables grow, default configs start to fall behind.

  • Federation queue visibility There’s no great built-in “at a glance” view—you end up relying on logs.

My Actual Workflow

Nothing fancy, just consistent habits:

Daily (quick check):

  • Check Uptime Kuma
  • Skim logs for obvious errors

Weekly:

  • Check disk usage (especially Pictrs)

Monthly:

  • Update containers (after reading changelogs)
  • Verify backups can actually be restored

As needed:

  • Moderation decisions

What I’d Do Differently

If I were starting over:

  • Set up proper log aggregation much earlier (still a weak spot for me)

TL;DR

  • Infra is the easy part once stable
  • Moderation is the real workload
  • Backups matter more than you think (and need testing)
  • Logs are your best friend—but painful without centralization

Happy to answer specifics if you’re planning a setup—there’s a lot of small gotchas that only show up once you’ve been running things for a while.

[–] nachitima@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

Hey, super helpful comment.

A few of the details you mentioned are exactly the kind of practical stuff I’m trying to collect, so I wanted to ask a bit more:

  • When you say you pushed federation workers up to 128, which exact setting are you referring to?
  • Roughly how big is your instance in practice — users, subscriptions, remote communities, storage size, daily activity?
  • What were the first signs that federation was falling behind, besides the Waiting for X workers log message?
  • Did increasing workers fully solve it, or did it just move the bottleneck somewhere else?
  • What kind of Postgres tuning ended up mattering most for you?
  • For backups, are you only doing weekly pg_dump + VPS backups, or also separately backing up pictrs, configs, secrets, and proxy setup?
  • Have you tested full restore end-to-end on another machine?
  • For pictrs growth, have you found any good way to keep storage under control, or is it mostly just “plan for it to grow”?
  • For monitoring/logging, if you were starting over, what would you set up from day one?

I’m mostly interested in the boring operational side of running Lemmy long-term: backup/restore, federation lag, storage growth, and early warning signs before things get messy.

Sorry if some of these questions are a bit basic or oddly specific — I’m using AI to help gather as much real-world Lemmy hosting experience as possible, and it generated most of these follow-up questions for me.