UselesslyBrisk

Yes the ansible config worked fine for me. I worked for days to get an kbin instance up. Ansible worked first go.

I have yet to get email working but otherwise its solid. Linode will block email btw if you account is new (and frankly may be blocking mine now). You just have to put in a case and justify and it should be fine. My account should be old enough to be exempt but I will likely do it anyhow. Their support is pretty good.

Getting federation crawled and communities added is a bit slow. Mostly because the other instances are a bit slow.

A few pointers if you havent done admin yet.

1. Put nothing in the federation allow list unless you want to go whitelist only. Over time as other instances hit yours and you search others, the linked list of instances will grow. Just use the blocklist if you want to block certain instances. I havent found a good way to block the growing number of instances in case they have some illegal content like CSAM. So...i may just go whitelist anyhow

2. Searching for instances seems to be CPU heavy on mine. Its not a problem though. You just cant simply plug in a URL of a community in another instance if you havent linked. You will get a 404 if you do. So you have to go to search, looking for that community by hitting search a few times until it shows up, then you can join and it will start crawling

3. I have no idea what "Private instance" does other than i believe it will keep your instance form starting in the future if you have it checked AND federation turned on. I saw some logs in dockers startup when i did it but nothing in the UI.,

Im currently on the 4GB dedicated. However heres an htop of it.

https://imgur.com/a/NpEsw4t

I am currently the only user. Im considering opening it up to limited users but not really having communities once i get a lot of the instances cached and indexable.

Others like @leopardboy@netmonkey.tech are running on a 2GB shared just fine. I will likely move to that if i choose to keep it solo for sure, or under 100 users and no communities.

I dont have the time to really moderate others or content on the instance. So i dont think I plan to host any communities at all. I do wish you could federate/sync specific communities to your instance to make searching/subscribing easier.

I’ve run linodes for years. My blog runs on them. I still host a variety of other services on them. They are good for everything from gaming servers to a blog etc.

They did get bought out by akamai a while back. And have raised their prices but they are still solid.

Nanodes are awesome deals frankly.

Yeah. I like the kbin dev as a person much better. And I can empathize with what he is going through. Its why i wanted to setup an instance and help spread the load. But I just couldnt get it working and didnt have the time to really dig in (I have a lot going on otherwise with work).

He did announce he is onboarding a sysadmin/netadmin to handle the stability and scaling issues so he can focus on commits which is good. Ill keep an eye out for updates and maybe migrate then.

I have a lab at home and do host some stuff for myself from there in a small DMZ (ie: Miniflux RSS readers, Plex through Reverse proxy etc).

But I used a linode for my lemmy/kbin stuff. Reason being is that the code is fairly new and there may be exploits bugs and

1. I dont want to deal with my ISP made an instance is exploited and becomes some type of C2 box or spews out spam. Kbin specifically already has PRs to fix XSS and Sql injection stuff, the former of which is usually avoidable if you just follow some pretty basic principles. So its a concern.

2. Linode has better bandwidth than my non-symmetrical ISP uplink and is on its own quota.

As someone that has spent the better part of the week mucking with it.... the kbin build docs have multiple gaps in the documentation and are functionally broken unless you have some better understanding of the setup. I WAS able to get the system built, but could never get it online. Best i got was 500 errors where the UI was up but there was a break somewhere in Redis, Postgres, Nginx etc. All the logs were clean though. This was with the docker method and build from source method on both Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian 11 (which are what he specifically referenced)

Lemmy was much easier to setup using the ansible method. I have an instance online. Though im still working out the federation thing and some other kinks. I figured it would just reach out to Activity pub and federate with everyone but now it seems I have to build a static list...If if search for an instance i know exists I get a

404: couldnt_find_community

So there are some gaps but it seems much more mature. For example you cant mark your instance private AND have federation enabled. If you do that and restart the instance will fail to come up, but theres no warning or error in the UI.

I like the kbin dev better as people. But the lemmy code is definately more polished, even if the devs are turd sammiches.

Browser.feddit doesnt include kbin right? Also it got removed from the main page....couldnt find the link...lol

Thats what they are doing

https://twitter.com/aaronp613/status/1669464567074680835

It wont. They are going to step in.

https://twitter.com/aaronp613/status/1669464567074680835

And a single place to find communities.

My truck is white because it’s hot AF outside and it there is a LOAD of difference between dark colors and white in the sun.

Kbins build docs are a nightmare. I have experience with Linux and docker. Can’t get them to work at all. Closest I get are 500 errors and one can’t find a log tossing errors to explain it to save my life.

Maybe I’m not as well familiarized with the parts and pieces as I thought, though I’ve built plenty of Drupal stacks and the like, even using docker and Ansible etc.

Then I look at PRs showing sql injection fixes and XSS fixes and I’m like…oh