I selfhost PhotoPrism.

I use a folder sync app, to upload all my pictures from my phone to a directory on my server, which PhotoPrism imports from every 15 mins(Might be a bit more or less).

I have used it for a couple of years and it has worked fine for me.

Photoprism

After hosting my own instance with just me for ca. 2 weeks:

1.99Gi pictrs

5.21Gi postgres

The internal path, I’m persisting is /mnt, but I also use an older version of pictrs(0.3.1). Think the newer version uses a different path.

I also needed to add the following for the pictrs container to work correctly.

  securityContext:
    runAsUser: 991
    runAsGroup: 991
    fsGroup: 991

For container orchestration, which is mostly what k8s provides, then you could use docker swarm or nomad. You could use docker-compose with multiple replicas of the wanted container + a load balancer to divide the load.

In general I don’t think k8s/k3s is needed for hosting lemmy yet, but since I have a setup for k3s, it is easier for me to use it.

I have only 1 container of pictrs running(with no scaling) and are using longhorn for storage, so if the pictrs container switches node, then longhorn handles it for me.

You can definitely have high availibillity without kubernetes, but its easier(For me atleast) with kubernetes.

My instance has 2 users. The domain name is endlesstalk.org

I host it on a k3s cluster with 2 nodes.

I also thought about using AWE SES, but I decided not to use it, since I was “sandboxed”(See more here).

I decided to use MXRoute, which have worked great for me so far. It is more expensive(50$ per year), than purelymail and Migadu, but for me reliabillity is very important, so I don’t mind paying a bit extra for it.

Ubuntu server(Xeon CPU E5-2650 v4 with 86 GB Ram) running k3s(My home server):

• App-daemon(Used with home assitant for more complicated automation)
• Bazarr
• Browserless(Currently used for rendering js pages for huginn)
• Dpaste
• Filerun
• Homeassistant
• Homer(My dashboard)
• Huginn
• Jellyfin
• Kaizoku(For downloading manga)
• Nzbget
• Nzbhydra
• Ombi
• Paperless
• Photoprism
• Pihole
• Plex
• Prowlarr
• Radarr
• Scrutiny(For checking my drives)
• Sonarr
• Qbittorrent with vpn
• Wiki.js
• Christmas-Community(Wishlist)
• ZwaveJS(For homeassistant)

2 Ubuntu servers running k3s(VPS used for my infrastructure services)

• Keycloak
• Offical docker registry
• Bitwarden
• Gitea
• Headscale
• Healthchecks(For checking backups)
• Uptime-kuma - Hashicorp vault

Infrastructure services runing on all servers

• ArgoCD(For deploying everything on k3s)
• Longhorn(For storage)
• Vault-secrets-operator(For getting secrets from vault into k3s)
• Traefik(My reverse proxy)

Lastly I’m hosting Lemmy on a leftover VPS, that I hadn’t used in a while. Might move to a bigger server though.