Federation takes time. For federation there are bots, that automatically subscribe to communities on different instances.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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The difference in votes is normal. To easily federate with other instances, you can use the 'Lemmy Subscriber Bot'. LSB
you will only see posts/comments/upvotes that happen AFTER you've subscribed to a community
when you subscribe to a community it will pull the most recent posts made but it won't pull the comments or upvotes for them, just the post itself
this is why a lot of instances use https://lemmy-federate.com/ but that will use up a lot of your disk space
but that will use up a lot of your disk space
About how much? I've got 128gb ssd in my "server" (ThinkPad X260).
My instance is close to two years old now, and on average has had about 2 MAU, with no (local) communities.
Currently we have about 700 active federated communities (that had any federated activity within last month), out of 900.[^1]
The on-disk size of both lemmy and pict-rs database[^2]
postgres@postgres:~$ pwd
/var/lib/postgresql
postgres@postgres:~$ du -sh data/
31G data/
I use pict-rs with S3 provider and the bucket size is currently at 22.82 GB (read: external network storage, this is probably mostly just thumbnails[^3]).
So in total there is almost 54GBs spent just for lemmy.
So assuming you have 100G remaining after system stuff and dedicate that box only to lemmy (and pict-rs media files) and use it mostly for yourself [^4], you should be alright for about 3-4 years (assuming that I am gaining about 27GBs total per year and that you will federate with a similar amount of a similarly active communities).
If you offload media storage to a hosted S3 bucket[^5] then you should be good for a lot longer as you will only need space for the postgres databases.
[^1]: The rest is either dead (instance gone) or no one is subscribed to them anymore (as such my instance is not getting any new content from there: neither posts nor comments or votes)
[^2]: Postgres itself reports about 2G less, don't really know why but I am guessing it has something to do with the filesystem being btrfs
[^3]: Edit: I currently do not use the "privacy" mode of pict-rs where it proxies all content (so that a bad guy can't post an image link to his server and unmask users IPs), this would increase the S3 size and slightly postgres size.
[^4]: You should use Lemmy Subscriber Bot to automatically federate little bit of random communities so that public All feed is not exact copy (minus NSFW comms) of whatever you as the only user subscribe to.
[^5]: Though keep in mind that S3 buckets eventually cost some money too, for example Cloudflare R2 charges $0.015 per 1GB, above the first 10GBs.
It will increase over time, and I think it would pass 100 GB in less than a year, but I'm just guessing. You can help reduce this by tweaking some settings with image caching/proxying
My instance has 82GB of DB size. It is almost two years old. I think you're overestimating.
Any other helpful Lemmy self hosting tips are also welcome.
Not sure whether it helps but after the last major update on YUNOhost it notified me of a few extra DNS entries I had to make. If I remember correctly it was under Domains, rather than Diagnosis.