Getting a domain name is very easy, I used namecheap. I decided to go with a cloud server as I don't have a good Internet connection at home.

I went with digital ocean and fired up an Ubuntu Lts "droplet" what they call a container.

I logged in and created a sudo user and disabled ssh for root for security reasons and ran updates.

I then followed the instructions for the Ansible installation. This took me some time to figure out what to do because I've never done anything like this before.

It's much easier if you have a Linux computer, I have a Linux partition on my windows laptop.

You do all of the instructions on your machine, fill out the configs with the domain name, etc. On your machine, then run the Ansible config and it will ssh into the server and install Lemmy for you.

Then you go back to namecheap and point your domain at the up address for your server.

Once that's connected you can go to your web address and set up your admin account.

I ran into issues along the way and nuked the install once just to start fresh.

The issue with email has to do with digital ocean not allowing emails, so you have to configure a third party mail forwarder. I have done this, but I cannot get it working with Lemmy, I can send test emails from the servers command line, so I'm not sure what to do. I got some help from the Lemmy matrix instance, but still nothing yet.

depends on your install method, I have linux servers I control so I setup the config and ran ansible. was running in mins. Took longer for DNS as it was a new name.