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.
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.