This is my understanding as well, though I believe the manual route is "not recommended" as far as the Lemmy documentation goes and Ansible/Docker are the preferred ways.

At the moment I'm trying to work out how to scale it horizontally (add more nodes) instead of vertically (make the one node bigger) as there's diminishing returns on the latter method but the documentation doesn't mention whether the "scale" option in Docker Compose is usable. That said it's early days and I've only just started looking into it 😊

A couple I’m aware of are Parsec and Moonlight. Parsec is a bit more polished and user friendly I think, but Moonlight is open source.

Coming back to update this thread after having stood up the server which I've called Krab Borg. All are welcome to join. As far as deploying it went, "Pretty easy" was subjective in this case; Docker itself is not inherently difficult to work with once you understand it, however Lemmy was super vague on how to deploy it.

A couple of things I got stitched up on that I hope save someone else the pain:

1. The docker compose file in the "main" Github branch is built for a non-production instance, so a bunch of unnecessary stuff is in there, and a bunch of necessary stuff isn't. I basically took the compose file from the 0.17.4 tag here. I also generated a long password to use as the API key for pictrs.

2. I use an external NGINX server (running on a different server to Lemmy) as the SSL termination point and internet-facing reverse proxy. I had issues with federation "sort of" working; some sites would federate while others wouldn't (I'd find the communities but get "Subscription Pending" when subscribing). It turns out I didn't put the full intermediate SSL certificate chain into my certificate file, so even though the site appeared to be working, some servers wouldn't accept the cert. This was hinted to me when I saw in packet traces that the remote side was sending RST packets after trying to subscribe to a community. Once I fixed the certificate chain in the file, this problem went away (Note - if you use Lets Encrypt this shouldn't be a problem).

3. This is well documented but just to really emphasise it - searching for a community will pull in ~50 of the most popular posts and no comments to give you something to start. You will not receive any new posts (and their comments) unless you actually subscribe to the community. I created a "sub booster" account which I used to subscribe to all of the communities I searched for, so as not to fill my own feed with too much that isn't relevant to my interests but to get content flowing into the server and make it diverse enough.

So far all is going well and now it's over to the more "operational" side, like figuring out how to get people in, what communities I should create vs bring in from external sites, etc.

If you'd like to know more about the instance, setting it up or the architecture it sits on, I'm more than happy to share the info or help you if you're stuck setting up your instance (I work in IT/Security which helps).