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Self-host personal Mastodon instance and Plex server

Are there any technical/performance reasons why I couldn’t create an instance for myself and host a Plex server off of the same machine at home?

I’m fairly new to self-hosting in general, so any insight would be appreciated!

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention that this would be for a Mastodon instance, not for Lemmy.

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17 comments

  • There's no context to the question?

    At face value, no, there's no technical reason you can't run a Plex server and a lemmy instance on one computer :)

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    • Oh shoot, I thought I included that this would be for a personal Mastodon instance.

      I was mainly curious to know if running both would somehow affect the performance of the other.

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  • Lemmy often racks up hundreds of gigabytes in logs and other crap, chokes up the hard drive, and then force restarts the server. Not fun for something you use to stream media from. Takes quite some tuning to get it sorted.

    If we are talking about two virtual machines on the same physical server with dedicated storage allocation, that shouldn't matter.

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    • Lol Wat.

      Op, just budget 200gb for lemmy and you'll be fine. Our entire lemmy.ca server is only using 100gb. It'll be a good learning experience!

      Also, check out jellyfin as a possible alternative to plex.

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      • I should have specified that I was interested in creating a Mastodon instance, not Lemmy, but I’m glad to know that I could do that should I want to build one.

        I’ve looked into Jellyfin as a secondary service. At the moment my parents have gotten used to navigating Plex and having them re-learn something new over the phone is…not something I have the energy or time for lol

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      • Doesn't all the federated images take up a shit ton of space?

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    • It's true, it logs a huge amount of stuff due to federation chatter. If you run it with docker, be sure to setup log rotation. I think the recommended lemmy ansible installation set the rotation to 50MB x 4 files. Or just /dev/null it.

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  • Sounds like it'd work great. You might want to use something like DigitalOcean instead of your home machine, for a couple different reasons. DigitalOcean is cheap for this type of application (like on the order of, IDK, $5-10 a month or something).

    Also, fair warning, the current generation of Fediverse software is a pain in the ass to install, even before you get into issues of upgrading it, staying on top of security of the server, etc etc. But sure, it's doable if you're savvy and willing to invest some small time into it.

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    • The cheapest digitalocean VPS doesn't have enough ram to host lemmy these days, especially after v0.19 update significantly increase database ram consumption. You'll have to use a vps with at least 4 GB of ram which will cost $24/mo. If you only want to spend $5/mo for that kind of VPS, you'll have to dig into lowendtalk.com to find some VPS deals from a somewhat reputable providers.

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    • From what I’ve read participating in the Federation does require some competent level of commitment. I might end up joining once the process matures a bit more and the barrier for entry is a little lower for complete novices like myself.

      Thanks for the service recommendation!

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  • I run Lemmy, Plex, and a bunch of other services from a desktop in my basement. It works great. The Lemmy docker setup is a little finicky but works well once you get it.

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    • My bad, I forgot to specify that I’d like to create a Mastodon instance, not Lemmy. Though it’s good to hear that people are having success.

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  • U can probably use docker and pass through a large storage volume

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  • Are you running Windows?

    Of so you can install Jellyfin to host your media library. Jellyfin is an alternative to Plex without the inline requirements.

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