Probably, yes, but I still love you

Best of luck on your new hobby!

I didn’t see anything in your post that set off alarm bells

If you’re looking to save some cash and your ISP gives you a stable public address you could utilize a Dynamic DNS provider (ala duckdns) instead of registering a domain

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #76 for this comm, first seen 11th Aug 2026, 19:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Just in general or because you're setting up a Lemmy instance?

Cool man... I did the same last year, best decision ever.

Pretty easy too

The only thing I'd say is look into whatever tooling and scripts people have made for removing CSAM from your instance. I messed around with a Lemmy instance for a bit, but when I heard about how hard it was to deal with the pedos, I got a little scared about inadvertently hosting CSAM and decided to shut it down. Since then I think I remember hearing about some better automated tooling for that kind of thing though so hopefully you can set that up.

Maybe. Do it anyway?

I would NOT host a Lemmy instance at home unless you're going to obfuscate your IP address. If you make it public, you're inviting any whackjob that sees your username to find your physical location. Additionally, I wouldn't host it on a PC that you actually intend to use for day to day stuff, just in case the instance gets hacked and someone manages to escape the container it's in. If you wanted to do this, I would put it on its own box with Cloudflare in front of it, otherwise you're inviting trouble where there doesn't need to be any.

My instance has been online for about a month, the supplied docker-compose.yaml was quite straightforward, had a little headache with Nginx but nothing overly complicated.

The long-con so to speak is federation, you have to subscribe to each community manually to begin federating with them, i have noticed timing issues with other instances such as Lemmy.world and have not been able to resolve them.

Not lemmy, but piefed. The easy way, try yunohost.

Yes, you are, but aren't we all?

I keep considering the same thing, except only letting myself register so that I can have my own stupid instance name.

Yes you are mad, I know as I did that over 3 years ago. Went from at home => a cheep VPS => paid for Oracle VPS.

If you go down the lemmy route (vs piefed) then I would deply with Lemmy-Easy-Deploy by @ubergeek77. this makes setting Caddy and mail simple

Thought about doing something very similar, I'll be curious to hear the feedback and your experience

Best of luck to you!!! I just went through this last week and wow it was a challenge. I went the docker route not using ansible…and yah by far the worst install I ever went through of all the self-hosting projects I have setup…but my setup was largely complicated by the fact I had an Apache reverse proxy setup in front of the nginx proxy that has an example config provided…finally figured it all out, but yah fun times 😂 happy to help if you get stuck.

The problem is not the setup but the administration

I did a very similar setup very recently. Its not bad. I did try piefed first as some people suggested, but had some issues and it felt like it just wasn't ready yet. I switched to self hosting lemmy and really like it. I also went with Brevo for email (I started with sendgrid, would not recommend).

Main difference for me is I am using cloudflare (they are my registrar and they allow me to deal with the CGNAT at no extra cost which you don't have to deal with not to mention a pretty solid WAF for free tier). You may want to implement a WAF of some kind to keep the federation in check. I federate both lemmy and a matrix home server and it doesn't eat up too much bandwidth.

I also like saving money, so a VPS is something I was trying to avoid. Personally, I don't think the VPS does a much for securing your home network as people are trying to say here. It is another layer of security, but it's not a panacea. Not saying I'll never try it though.

Lemmy eventually plans on having an invite system, you could maybe use that when it comes out

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/4128

(You can also do this manually with the application questionnaire field and a spreadsheet)

Yes. Do PieFed.

Also, don't do cloudflare. If you must use something, make sure it's self hosted.

I would not do that without first looking into applicable laws regarding legal liability for content and requirements to remove things. Depending on where in the world you are, this can be a minefield.

How much RAM do you have available? Do you have an unlimited internet connection?

Do it. You'll learn something new. Maybe you'll even contribute to the code.

Why not host a PieFed instance instead? Similar but more features and easier to maintain. Does have some scraper countermeasures built in, so maybe you don't even need Cloudflare. Also as a next project after that, you could learn Python and contribute to the project.

I probably wouldn't host it at home, there are so many personal devices containing personal information on the network that I don't consider the risks involved worth it. I would get a VPS, even if they've increased in price lately. If you do set it up at home, you will have to harden the server and the network, and that requires a lot of time, knowledge and effort. Just keep this in mind!

You will learn a ton. Also, you will spend a lot of money hosting an activitypub instance. I run a server for fun, and it's about $40/month to handle the absolute firehose of assets I receive 24/7.

its really easy to setup with yunohost if you're lazy, idr if it was too bad to host lemmy, think having friendica and others was my issue that cause my 160gb to fill up in a few months, didn't want to deal with it anymore lol

You should not host anything that's going to be public facing on your home network in 2026, period. Get a cheap German VPS and go nuts with it. There's simply too much at stake opening up your home router/firewall for such little gain. Plus, being a residential IP behind NAT might just make it straight up impossible.

I host my own email and a matrix server. I would never think of exposing my home network to the internet. I use tailscale to get into the homelab, anything exposed to the net lives somewhere far, far away.

I use netcup for my email and matrix. It's extremely reasonable.

Not necessarily, but why choose a project that needs interfacing with an existing ecosystem where it can mostly only be noise?

If you want to deal with a complicated mess of a system as a project, you could always grab Arch

You're an idiot of you don't use PieFed instead 😃