this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Yeah, regardless of your choice you'll still need to buy a domain so I would do that first. Choose something you like, and look at all the fun different TLDs out there beyond just .com. Be careful though, some of them are trying to be exclusive so can be surprisingly pricey.
If you choose to do this relatively simply in a cloud provider... you can set up the domain to use their DNS servers (usually free) which would make things easier since most of the stuff you are doing for lemmy is all in one place. From there launch an instance (I would choose one of the ones priced around $10/mo and enable backups which costs another buck or two) and point your DNS at it. Then use the official ansible install method which will get you the rest of the way there, including taking care of the gruntwork of SSL/Let's Encrypt.
There are all sorts of different ways you could do this to make your stuff more reliable in case the machine on the cloud provider, disks, entire datacenter (it happens) has a problem, but this is reasonably robust, especially for such a low price point.|
Again, if you have any specific questions or trouble, let me know.
I will! Thanks!
Oh, one really important thing once you have Lemmy up and running is to make sure your instance is not set to open registration (have it closed or application-only), and if possible set it up to do email verification (which is a little complex since you need to set up your instance to send emails). There is a huge wave of bot signups happening. Captcha, application-based (or closed) signup and email validation were the only ways to fight back against this wave, and sadly the latest release of Lemmy removed the captcha feature as it was deemed ineffective and not friendly for accessibility reasons (e.g. vision impairments).