bleh

I run a modest Lemmy instance (lemmy.blehiscool.com). It’s not on the scale of lemmy.world or anything, but it’s been around long enough that I’ve had to deal with some real growth and scaling issues. I’ll try to focus on what actually matters in practice rather than theory.

Infrastructure

I’m running everything via Docker Compose on a single VPS (22GB RAM, 8 vCPU). That includes Postgres, Pictrs, and the Lemmy services.

This setup is great right up until it suddenly isn’t.

The main scaling issue I hit was federation backlog. At one point, the queue started piling up badly, and the fix was increasing federation worker threads (I’m currently at 128).

If you run into this, check your lemmy_federate logs—if you see:

“Waiting for X workers”

that’s your early warning sign.

What Actually Takes Time

Once your infrastructure is stable, the technical side becomes pretty low-effort.

The real time sink is moderation and community management. Easily 90% of the work.

On the technical side, my setup is pretty straightforward:

• Auto updates: Watchtower (with major versions pinned)
• Monitoring: Uptime Kuma
• Backups: Weekly pg_dump + VPS-level backups

Backups are boring right up until they aren’t. Test your restores. Seriously.

Where the Gaps Are

The main gaps I’ve run into:

• Pictrs storage growth Images from federated content add up fast. Keep an eye on disk usage.

• Postgres tuning As tables grow, default configs start to fall behind.

• Federation queue visibility There’s no great built-in “at a glance” view—you end up relying on logs.

My Actual Workflow

Nothing fancy, just consistent habits:

Daily (quick check):

• Check Uptime Kuma
• Skim logs for obvious errors

Weekly:

• Check disk usage (especially Pictrs)

Monthly:

• Update containers (after reading changelogs)
• Verify backups can actually be restored

As needed:

• Moderation decisions

What I’d Do Differently

If I were starting over:

• Set up proper log aggregation much earlier (still a weak spot for me)

TL;DR

• Infra is the easy part once stable
• Moderation is the real workload
• Backups matter more than you think (and need testing)
• Logs are your best friend—but painful without centralization

Happy to answer specifics if you’re planning a setup—there’s a lot of small gotchas that only show up once you’ve been running things for a while.

So emotional.

Frog

Me too.

Originally ‘woke’ meant being aware of social injustice, especially racism. Over time it evolved to become associated with broader progressive politics more broadly, now it’s used to either insult or compliment depending on who is speaking.