I have both a misskey and lemmy instance. For both I used https://servarica.com/ with the cheapest summer deal Flying Fish SSD. It's like 55 a year. (Or you can pay monthly but I'd highly suggest to save up and pay yearly) (kinda lie, I got a bigger one for lemmy but it's overkill)

If you have never installed software before on a VPS (virtual private server) you're in for a learning ride. If this is the case, be patient, don't give up.

Misskey is similar to mastadon. You can also look into calkey which is similar to misskey.

The hardest part of setting it up was the settings. But since I already know Docker and whatever it was easy going otherwise.

Though I still don't have email working... Bleh

Misskey you add relays. Relays are like lists of instances to join in the fediverse. You then block instances you don't like.

Lemmy, you block instances you don't approve and can set it up so you can white list as well.

Also important, lemmy doesn't automatically add other instances. How it works is, any user on your instances has to subscribe to another using the full search key !blah@domain.tld then once ONE user is subscribed, everyone else can search it via keyword.

Because of that I created a bot that went through all my approved instances and subscribed to all communities in there. It stopped around 3500 subscribed communities. I'll have to run it again sometime.

Lemmy’s allowlist feature is generally recommended against. It limits federation to only that list, which makes discoverability harder than it already is.

For a self-serving instance, it’s more tenable to use a blocklist and federate normally.

In case of Lemmy I used Lemmy-Easy-Deploy script. To host I used Oracle Cloud always free tier. Its risky because I've heard people say that since its free they can just pull the plug at any time, so you might consider to upgrade it to paid account, I heard its cheap. About requirements I have no idea. Im running my on a VM instance with Ubuntu minimal 22.04 aarch64. I pushed it to the maximum allowed for free account: 4 ARM cpu with 24Gb of Ram. I dont know anything about hosting mastodon.

Doing this, running on a VPS with 1GB of RAM perfectly fine. No whitelisting required but you will have to manually subscribe to everything you want to see, so such thing as a proper "all" feed since this only shows feeds that users of your instance are subscribed to. Subscriptions are a bit weird, you want to search for the full URL of a sublemmy, then try it again after some minutes for it to work since it has to be fetched first. The ansible playbook is ridiculously easy to use for deployment.

Mastodon is a different beast, from what I saw so far, this needs much more configuration effort for deployment.

https://github.com/jheidecker/lemmony

This will take care of the other commenters point about having to manually subscribe to everything. I just had it pull the top 500 communities from the top two instances and I'm fine...

I'm doing both on the cheapest VPS on Hetzner, but needed to add more hard drive space, especially mastodon needs a lot.

Rather than setting up a VPS like some of you is there a reason I couldn't run this on my existing home unraid server?

I took the easy way out for Mastodon with a managed host because I wanted to open it up to toher folks. But I did self host it for a bit and it was fine. Pleroma was a bit more to my liking, but Mastodon won out.

A couple of weeks ago, I did set up my Lemmy instance on a single core, 1GB RAM, 10GB HDD VPS. I'm not subscribed to a ton of communities and haven't bothered with the different seeding scripts. So far so good though! I'm really happy with it.