I’m interested in possibly hosting my own Lemmy instance - just for my own account. I was thinking of hosting it on Raspberry Pi (possibly the 1GB Pi 4 B), but I couldn’t find much for definitive information on what the hardware requirements would be for such an instance to know if this is even possible. How much storage is required? Is the Pi 4 CPU powerful enough? How much memory?
Please correct me if I am wrong, but this feels like a flaw with how Lemmy (perhaps other fediverse apps as well, I’m not sure) is designed. Why do I need to store all posts made to a community that one of the users on my instance subscribes to? Would it not be better to simply store my user’s posts, and comments, and the posts made to any communities hosted on my instance? Why do I need to store information from other instances, and users?
It’s caching posts from other servers so that if you have an instance with a few hundred or thousand people on it and they all open the home page you don’t send out thousands of requests for each post and end up DDOSing a bunch of other servers.
I don’t really understand this reasoning. Some server would still need to receive those requests at some point. Would it not be better if those requests were distributed, rather than pounded onto one server? If you have a server caching all the content for its users, then all of its users are sending all of those requests for content to that one single server. If users fetched content from their source servers, then the load would be distributed. The only real difference that I can think of is that the speed of post retreival. Even then, though, that could be flawed, as perhaps the source server is faster than one’s host server.
The data does get pulled, but only if it is “old.” If you just pulled 0.5 seconds ago, you don’t even need to check.