Hi, I’m new with self-hosting but managed to set up my own Lemmy and Mastodon instances on a VPS recently. However, I ran into an issue with disk space quite rapidly (which I had way too few, because I started with the cheapest, smallest package for my VPS).

Now I prepare a new setup, where I’ll be able to dynamically scale disk space as needed, but this can get expensive quickly. Therefor my question: How much disk space do I typically need for private (1-3 user) instances of Lemmy and Mastodon? Are there settings, where I can limit the disk space utilization (at the cost of older stored content being overwritten)?

I would be fine with needing up to like 30-40 GB, but any more than that would be getting kinda expensive …

  • Ruud@lemmy.worldM
    6·
    1 year ago

    Do you need Mastodon, or can it be something similar? Mastodon does a lot of caching. For my single-user instance I run Akkoma, which is very leight-weight and has all (even more) features Mastodon has.

    • Ruud@lemmy.worldM
      5·
      1 year ago

      By the way this is Media disk usage for my Mastodon instance, but it’s not really small ;-)

      • void_wanderer@lemmy.world
        21·
        1 year ago

        So, how much do you spend, why are you doing it, and do you get any funding or paying this or of your pocket? (just trying to understand how the fediverse works)

  • losttourist@kbin.social
    21·
    1 year ago

    I can’t help with Lemmy, but I’ve been running a single-user Mastodon instance for almost a year now.

    Like you, I found that the media very quickly used up much more disk space than I anticipated. There are a few things you can do.

    You can tune how long media is stored for: some of this is done in the admin interface, but really you need to set up cron jobs to regularly run various tootctl commands. This is the crontab I use:

    SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/home/mastodon/.rbenv/shims:/home/mastodon/.rbenv/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

RAILS_ENV=production
# Remove media attachments older than 8 days
11  19  *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove --days 8
# Remove link previews older than 28 days
22  5   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl preview_cards remove --days 28
# Remove files not linked to any post
 3  23  *   *   0     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove-orphans
# Prune remote accounts that never interacted with a local user
44  1   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl accounts prune

    You can of course choose even stricter settings but I found that no matter what I did, given that I am following approx 1,000 other Fediverse accounts it still used up more disk space than I was comfortable with.

    So I offloaded most of the media storage onto an S3-compatible service. It’s breaking the self-hosting ethos somewhat, but with Backblaze B2 I can happily store and serve several hundred GB of media files for just a couple of dollars a month. To me, that was a no-brainer.