I created a Lemmy instance!
I can't get email working and I federation doesn't seem to work either, but it's up!
I created an instance for the town I live in as the main form of communication is a fb page. Once I get these issues fixed I will promote it and hopefully get people using it.
you need to subscribe to other communities from your home instance before you see anything. The federation only syncs what your users subscribe to, this gives your more control over your content, helps prevent DoS style attacks and allows the network to grow much larger than if we tried to sync everything all the time.
I haven't figured out how to do that. For example, if I put the url for this thread into the search bar on my instance it says there are 0 results.
Multiple ways to skin the cat, you can use community names as well, there are also multiple lookup sites I keep a list of resources that can help you find things to sub to.
Also you need to make sure you use the link from the instance the thread is on if you use the link for any other instance it won't work.
What was the experience like getting it up and running?
Getting a domain name is very easy, I used namecheap. I decided to go with a cloud server as I don't have a good Internet connection at home.
I went with digital ocean and fired up an Ubuntu Lts "droplet" what they call a container.
I logged in and created a sudo user and disabled ssh for root for security reasons and ran updates.
I then followed the instructions for the Ansible installation. This took me some time to figure out what to do because I've never done anything like this before.
It's much easier if you have a Linux computer, I have a Linux partition on my windows laptop.
You do all of the instructions on your machine, fill out the configs with the domain name, etc. On your machine, then run the Ansible config and it will ssh into the server and install Lemmy for you.
Then you go back to namecheap and point your domain at the up address for your server.
Once that's connected you can go to your web address and set up your admin account.
I ran into issues along the way and nuked the install once just to start fresh.
The issue with email has to do with digital ocean not allowing emails, so you have to configure a third party mail forwarder. I have done this, but I cannot get it working with Lemmy, I can send test emails from the servers command line, so I'm not sure what to do. I got some help from the Lemmy matrix instance, but still nothing yet.
depends on your install method, I have linux servers I control so I setup the config and ran ansible. was running in mins. Took longer for DNS as it was a new name.