AS a ex single lemmy user, yes. I use PieFed instead. Background: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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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.
*Baker's dozens
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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!
And now running both Lemmy and PieFed side by side (OP, posting from my PieFed account).
I think admin wise I am going to stick with PieFed. Definitely liking it more!
It's something I've wanted to do for a while. Honestly I want to host a Lemmy instance and my own peertube instance.
Two things are stopping me. I don't understand certain points of how things interact in the software or how to set it up properly to self host and be comfortable in it's security. I barely understand docker and some other stuff. It sucks because I understood how to use DOS at an around 14 by reading the manual. I also don't have the funding to do so in a way that I would feel comfortable at this point. I don't fully trust co-mingling my home services with web services due to the security risks.
Maybe try something like YunoHost. That's a web server Linux distribution. And it's supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You'd need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn't the only option to help with the set up.)
But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.
YuNoHost is a great alternative, but if you really want to learn, I would instead recommend really spending some time learning Docker; you don't have to understand how to build your own images (although that is also very useful), but mostly what is going on at a high level, and then switch to Docker Compose. These days it is extremely easy to run very complex architectures with a single compose file.
You also don't need to make it public for your tests, you can always start with local ip addresses and you own computer, or if you have a small computer that can run headless, then you can setup your experiments in there.
I will have to take another look. I've seen it before but didn't see anything about Lemmy and such.
This is like the opposite of what you want to do for complex software - don't add more abstraction, or you won't know what to do when stuff goes wrong!
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as a single user lemmy, no
I have heard from others who have done this that the storage space for the content will fill up incredibly quick unless you keep it disconnected from federation.
Ah, good catch. This is something I have to look into. Other self-hosted apps I have usually keep a local cache for a few days only and fetch on demand when needed. Need to explore if both Lemmy and PieFed to something similar.
Lemmy fetches everything that has ever been posted in any community that any user on that instance is subscribed to and keeps it indefinitely.
Since most activity happens in big communities that most people are subscribed to, most instances keep full, persistent copies of most things that were ever posted to lemmy.
That's why Lemmy scales so badly. If Lemmy was the size of Reddit, every instance would have to have storage capacity in the same order of magnitude as all of Reddit itself.
The problem only gets worse with time, since all that has been posted still remains.
The total replication also means that the copies need to be moderated by every instance individually, since every instance stores a copy of everything. So if e.g. someone posts illegal content on another instance and your instance stores a replica, you are just as legally liable for that illegal content as the original instance. Thus you have to moderate everything that runs over your instance.
Moderation effort is thus also replicated across all instances.
That bad scaling in storage and moderation is btw the reason why e.g. lemm.ee shut down. It was just too much cost and work to keep the instance running.
As far as I can tell PieFed already handles deleting old content (1 week by default, but I’m looking at the code on my phone so not the best way of doing research). I’ll do some more code reading later if I have a chance.
Hi, single user lemmy instance here. I'd say it's been smooth sailing for now. I might consider moving to piefed like other folks here, but I'll keep it and see. Right now i can't even upgrade due to arm64 docker images are broken at the moment, but it's sufficient enough.
EDIT: Seems like it's fixed, yippee :D https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6201#issuecomment-3693373333 kudos to mattlqx :)
How much storage is it using?
~3GB according to postgres, ~545MB for the pictures. Not too bad actually.
That's pretty good!
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Running "my" own single user instance here.
Great! Love it! The whole idea.
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I run a single user PieFed instance for a month now. Compatible with Lemmy. Everything runs smooth so far.
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.
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I did it for a while and it was a fun little technical project but once the pictrs image cache exhausted the amount of storage I got in the cloud host service's free tier, I stopped because I didn't feel like spending money on it
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 😉.
My instance runs great... I've got it on NVME drives and a system with 64GB of RAM. When I was hosting it on Digital Ocean, I often ran into performance issues with RAM (I think I just had 2GB). Since the switch it's been rock solid.
I am running them on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM and a 2TB NVMe SSD. Loving it.
Another single-user Piefed guy weighing in. Do it.
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.
generally it is fine but it is kind of resource intensive
I run dullsters.net which is sort of a single user instance. Nobody else can make accounts it's strictly for one community.
Having to run a full-blown PostgreSQL instance just for a single user is a show-stopper for me.
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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]
Also might be worth thinking about what else you are self hosting. Don't want to self host all of your communication apps; that would be brittle.
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