I am a software developer by craft and a linux system admin by hobby. I cannot commit to moderating and managing my own instance, but I would be glad to help someone with the technical aspects.
The most common complaint I saw in Reddit and here about switching to Lemmy is the difficulty of setting it up, so I thought I would help bridge this gap.
While I have never hosted my own instance before, I already checked the setup guide and it looks pretty simple to me, so I am confident I can do it. Please feel free to comment or DM.
It would be great if you can comment general questions. I can then respond to you here and maybe others will see it and know how to host their own instances too.
Thanks for offering your knowledge! I successfully set up and instance using their docker installation guide. However I was never able to get the smtp server to work. I first tried to add postfix to the docker-compose file like they have in the ansible installation example on github, but that didn’t work. Just trying to add an email address to my account would stall the UI with a spinning animation on the Save button. I then tried to update the hjson config file by adding my sendgrid api credentials and removing postfix from docker compose. That gave me the same result. At that point I kinda gave up and deleted my vps. I don’t have access to my error logs anymore, but I can spin up a new vps to try to get the same errors again if needed.
A lot of VPS providers block port 25 (and other email ports) because they don’t want people to set up bot spam mail servers on their services. Could that be the issue?
I’m using a VPS with Hetzner. I’ll have to look up if it’s blocked. Thanks for the info.
I’m in the same boat and confirm that yes, port 25 is blocked.
Port 25 is almost universally blocked because of this. It’s also blocked on a lot of residential ISPs for the same reason. This is probably one of those things where the documentation could be improved. A quick Google of the docker container that is being used for postfix says that we should be able to use another SMTP relay through gmail or another provider as an example, although I have not tried yet.
If you have Cloudflare you can set up an email alias for incoming email and then create a secondary Gmail address on top of your existing one for outgoing email. If you go to ‘Settings > Accounts and Import > Send mail as’ and add another email address (not an alias) with the same email as the one you setup on Cloudflare (noreply@yourdomain.com). You will likely need to create a Gmail app password to sign into the email server if you use 2FA.
Once you’ve created this email Gmail will send you a confirmation email to confirm it’s all working. Then you can just enter Google’s SMTP server info for Lemmy along with your email (your actual email, not the CF one), and the app password you created.
If done it this way for a few services beyond Lemmy and it’s worked well so far. This way you’re also using a Gmail account technically so you can hopefully avoid blacklists and spam filters.
Amazon has a very generous free tier for outgoing email in SES, and it is pretty easy to set up.