I do appreciate your feedback, but I think at a minimum that anyone trying to run a Lemmy instance in Docker should know how to install docker and docker compose and how to run basic commands like docker compose up -d. There are many tutorials out there for doing just that and I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. Once you have gotten that part done my document kicks in and picks up where the official documentation is currently lacking (in my opinion).

I do explain a lot, but I did my best to explain it in terms that most anyone could understand.

I will take your feedback to heart and maybe try to write a step by step tutorial for people who are completely new to Docker as well.

I don’t use unraid, so I’d have no way to develop and test it. But I think all you really need to do is install docker and docker compose and then just follow my guide.

Thanks for your comment, but I don’t see much value in pulling a new copy of the docker-compose.yml from the Lemmy GitHub. The only things I would be updating when Lemmy updates is the tag/version. If they added new environment variables some time in the future I could certainly take a look at their updated compose file to see the changes but I wouldn’t want to pull it down and replace my custom compose.

I specifically don’t care for their (Lemmy devs) choices for logging, docker networking, and the built in nginx, so removing and simplifying all that was my main goal. Everyone has their own way of doing things, and this is mine.

I will probably take a look at your Traefik configs and add them as a separate document for those that don’t want to use NPM. My goal is to add a subsection for most of the current revproxy choices.

I do not recommend using Ansible. It adds additional requirements and complexities that are unnecessary. Ansible is a great tool for managing multiple servers and software installs, in my opinion it is not the right tool to install Lemmy on a single instance. My install instructions require only that you have docker and docker compose installed.

That said, you could easily replace the docker-compose.yml that Ansible set up for you with the one I am providing. Just don’t run Ansible against your server again or it will wipe out your changes.

I only have com/net/org domains, so I never noticed that. But you’ve provided good information. There is a list of CloudFlare supported TLD’s here https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/

I have most of my domains on Google, but also have a couple on CloudFlare. I suppose I will just move them all to CloudFlare. They offer free WHOIS privacy and several other features for free. For those of you self hosting on a dynamic IP, there’s a pretty good API that you can use for DNS updates.

There are things other than porn that is nsfw. Some workplaces are strict.

Basically I don’t want people posting nude pics/videos of themselves or others. That’s against the spirit of the community.

But other content that might not be acceptable on a work screen would be ok.

Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.

If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.

That’s not how Lemmy works. You just need an account on ONE instance. And then subscribe to all the communities that interest you, some may be local to your instance and some may be hosted on other instances.

Honestly, I hope not.

For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that’s what should happen.

I was never insinuating that an instance owner should limit their scope. But just because you run an instance doesn’t mean you have to be the home node for all the communities you are interested in. It goes against the idea of federation. If a community already exists on another instance, as an instance owner you should subscribe to that community rather than making your own. That increases resilience.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to create a new community. I’m saying that due diligence should be taken BEFORE creating a new community, to be sure that community doesn’t already exist.

Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I’d prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could - hopefully - at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There’s a reason why every community shouldn’t be on a single instance. It’s a single point of failure.

I hope to see this community take off and take precedence over the one on lemmy.ml. I have been disappointed the past couple of days because most of the IT related subs seemed to be there and they have only been intermittently available and they seem to be having some trouble with federating their content to other instances. It’s not their fault, they are clearly being hugged much too tightly.

Also I know its just the nature of things to have competing subs, even on Reddit it happened. But I’d prefer not to have a split-brain situation with a sysadmin community nor do I want to be forced in to cross posting everything to both communities to increase my chances of engagement.

I tried doing that with a previously unsearched/unsubscribed community as a test on my own instance, and I got a 404: couldnt_find_community error when clicking the link. As you stated, it seems like in most cases that special link will not work unless someone has previously manually searched for the same community in your instance.

I think I’d rather link directly to the instance for the community than get a 404 error. For most people, getting the 404 will just deter them from proceeding further.

Perhaps it would be best to include both links in a post?

I was explaining it to a friend today, and I came to the conclusion that Lemmy is a LOT like the old FIDOnet message network that was used on BBS’s.