this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
46 points (94.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43907 readers
1487 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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).