I tried earlier today and I had no luck actually getting an instance running
It would help if the explanation was specific to a raspberry pi
As a self taught self-hosting enthusiast i wouldn’t recommend ansible to a beginner. I know that sounds backwards as absible makes everything easy and does all the work for you but that’s also part of the problem. It would be like jumping behind the wheel of a self driving car without knowing how to drive at all. When (not if) something goes wrong it could go wrong hard and you’d lose the whole instance.
It’s better to start with some other self hosted projects that interest you to get a feel for the process and software like docker then work your way up to bigger things like lemmy. I consider myself fairly versed in the process and lemmy still gave me some issues to set up and my pixelfed instance still won’t federate despite my best efforts. I’m pretty sure i know the issue, i just need to get around to fixing it.
Last thought, the raspberry pi is a pretty impressive little pc for it’s size and price point but you might find yourself quickly burning through resources depending on the number of active users you have and how heavily you use it.
Learning how to use your pi to run a reverse proxy to a self hosted blogging site would give you plenty of hands on starter experience. Run docker and portainer and mess with docker config files from a webgui to see what work and what doesn’t.
I agree completely with self hosting lemmy for a beginner. But disagree completely about ansible.
Learning to script your environment is extremely useful for stability, maintainability, and security.
Could you give somd examples of something to selfhost? I am only really aware of selfhosting lemmy and other fediverse stuff
Replace existing online services you use with self hosted ones.
So, I’m not new to this (omg it’s been 6+ years now wtf) but I don’t host a lot of stuff, and it’s been pretty easy to poke at; I’ve got:
- plex
- minecraft (bedrock and java)
- freshrss
- rustdesk
- home assistant
- vaultwarden
- pihole
- actual (budget software)
Running in docker containers, along with a few of the built-in plug-and-play services on my nas. Of that list, plex, minecraft, freshrss, rustdesk, and vaultwarden were very easy to setup in my situation. Rustdesk is a really good remote control program/service, vaultwarden is a fork of the bitwarden server, and plex was almost comically simple to get going as a media host.
I’m still getting my pieces together for my first server but I’m definitely gonna look into actual!
You could set up a dns based ad-blocker like pihole and a vpn like wireguard to tunnel your phone back into your home network so you have ad-blocking on the go, too. That’s a semi beginner protect with plenty of tutorials to pick from.
You could run nextcloud, syncthing, or immich to make your own cloud at home but that might need more than a basic pi setup.
I actually set up pihole today!
It’s a great software to run. I like to watch youtube tutorials that explain things step by step so i can understand what happens. If i find a good video i’ll see what other software that channel may have a tutorial on and if that software may interest me.
Replace existing online services you use with self hosted ones.
