So I asked if I was an idiot for coming up with the bright idea to start my own lemmy instance. Well I can proudly state that yes, I am an idiot, but I’m an idiot with his own lemmy instance: MopLemmy.fyi. Barebones and barely federated, but by God it’s mine.

A brief summary of the issues I ran into: Lemmy Easy Deploy was absolutely the right way to go, thanks ᛒᛚᚢᛖᛇᚦᛖᚱ@no.lastname.nz for that suggestion. I’ve very new to several aspects of this so just understanding containers and when to use LED commands and not standard container commands ended up being the biggest hurdle to deploying the instance.

Email. Everything about getting the SMTP setup was basically terrible. Brevo won’t let you make an account using an email address with a “.” in it, so I ended up needing to make an email account so I could make an email account. Then I was troubleshooting a typo error for too long, and then I was troubleshooting a bad bit of info I got from the internet which had me using my account email address instead of the Brevo created one for the SMTP, so those were human error and by far the single most time consuming issue.

Second to that, a script to check if my external IP address changed. This ended up being the single most annoying thing, partly because of my newbity. I was using Remote Desktop Connection into my Linux box and copy and pasting stuff. Copy and paste was screwing up the data and kept breaking things. Once I realized that and switched to SSH things went smoother. I know, rookie mistake.

Setting up backups to my RAID that I could then access from my Samba share ended up being another issue. First it was saving to the wrong folder, then I thought I had broken my Samba share and couldn’t access it from the network… and the problem ended up being UFW because I forgot to allow Samba through the frickin’ firewall. Oh and then the same thing happened when I was trying to look at my Netdata but at least that time I figured it out much quicker.

Those were the major annoyances, the rest was more about the learning experiences of finding out certain things were a lot more complicated than I thought they would be. I did not expect to have to put so many different DNS records. I didn’t expect to have to spend so much time deciding on white list vs black list federation, or host images local or not, or image retention, etc. But it’s up and stable and working and I am very slowly federating to more communities and deciding what all I want to be able to see. Thanks to everyone on the original post with advice and suggestions, even the people who suggested things I ended up not doing, heh.