I am fairly new to Lemmy and was thinking of getting an account on one of the “big” servers to get the full experience, but then I figured I could do exactly the same thing as with my GoToSocial and other services: run my own instance.
I am wondering if this is an overkill or not. Any experience running your own small Lemmy instance? Are there better options that are compatible with Lemmy but lighter to run for this purpose?
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as a single user lemmy, no
I run a single user PieFed instance for a month now. Compatible with Lemmy. Everything runs smooth so far.
I did it for a while but I had loads of annoying lags in updates, guess you had to roam around to get things going, maybe it’s all okay now, IDK. If it’s just for surfing I don’t see any reason to do it, otherwise it was a fun experiment.
AS a ex single lemmy user, yes. I use PieFed instead. Background: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed
would be nice if it’s possible to use mlmym with piefed… luckily it seems like boost and voyager now works tho
Yes join the dosins of us 🥧
I mean you jest, hence upvoting, but I also find it funny that more people use PieFed now than are on lemmy.ml (edit: to explain, that is by far the most talked about instance across the entire Threadiverse). On PieFed.social alone there are >1k active users.
As others have already said, piefed is much lighter than lemmy, and is what I’m running as well, my instance isn’t necessarily single-user, (anyone’s free to join), but there’s only one other user on my instance
yeeeeaaaahhhhh boiiiiii
And there they are!
I run a single user instance and it’s horribly slow. Mostly because I only have HDDs and not enough RAM to compensate. I hope Lemmy 1.0 will increase database performance.
Piefed is supposedly much more performant. But I’m shying away from migrating because I don’t want to lose my post history and uploaded pictures.
Maybe there’s a way to import contents through federation? Just, if both run on the same hardware when doing it (possibly the new instance on a subdomain), both would run way slower.
Canceling all subscriptions would probably make Lemmy use almost no resources.
I did it for a while but my system was constantly busy and there was this controversy about the image cache and possible CSAM which then prompted me to switch to using the flagship instance. Haven’t tried any of the alternatives, though.
I run dullsters.net which is sort of a single user instance. Nobody else can make accounts it’s strictly for one community.
Directly compatible with Lemmy, there’s Friendica (Facebook-like; also compatible with Twitter-like posts e.g. from Mastodon), Mbin (simplified/cleaner UI; also hybrid like Friendica), and PieFed (apparently more Reddit-like than Lemmy from what I read, in a technical sense).
Dunno which are better/worse to run, but I remember seeing hardware requirements on the docs of each of them.
Also it’s not uncommon to see single user instances from my experience. But if you feel it’s a waste of domain/resources, you could also create some dedicated community or something to give further use for it.
Also on the images issue pointed by another user, maybe also see if Lemmy now has a solution for it, or if any of the alternatives do.
The solution is to not proxy images. Might even be the default by now. That’s a huge resource hog. No idea what pictrs is doing but it’s still taking up a whole lotta space just for my own images.
Tangencial comment, but as I’d presume your instance is running on a Linux server (usually sites are), maybe check with ncdu (if available) which folders are the biggest?
Another single-user Piefed guy weighing in. Do it.
I run a more-or-less single user instance. It’s fine. Not the fastest page-loads but otherwise NBD.
I’m hosting the Decronym bot on a single-user instance, and it’s a real pain. The bot’s been down for weeks, actually, because an upgrade failed with some obscure error around the database schema…
I’ve ended up just today, wiping the whole thing and starting over, losing all data and having to refederate the bot. So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend.
[Acronyms to help the bot re-establish: LVM, HASS, k8s]
Have run Lemmy and now Piefed, it’s nice to have things customized to your wants, but probably wouldn’t bother if it was setting up a host just for that.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HASS Home Assistant automation software LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping k8s Kubernetes container management package
[Thread #982 for this comm, first seen 5th Jan 2026, 18:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Thanks for all the feedback!
I’m going to take a look at PieFed, maybe run both in parallel for a few weeks and see which one fells better 😉.
Here is a potentially very helpful thread: https://slrpnk.net/post/29381524/18801279
