Gorgeous! Is there any chance that you have more build details? A list of parts needed or even perhaps photos or video of your work would be great!

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.

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 OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.

Of the themed instances that exist now, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren’t strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.

For example, I’m sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the lemmy@lemmy.ml community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.

I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There’s nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn’t force those subs on anyone else on the instance.

And if you don’t want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join a general Lemmy instance like Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.

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.

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.

If you are familiar with Docker, you can easily run it in your existing VPS. It doesn’t use a lot of resources.

If you are not familiar with Docker, you should look in to it.

https://docker-curriculum.com/

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-beginners-guide-to-docker-how-to-create-your-first-docker-application-cc03de9b639f/

I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.

The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.

I’m assuming you’re using docker.

Make sure you have websockets support turned on.

You might also try to add custom locations under NPM. I made those changes at the same time I made some changes to the “advanced” tab of NPM. I’m not sure which thing fixed it, or maybe it required both. Try this, and if it still doesn’t work, then add the advanced tab settings farther down this reply.

You will need custom locations in your NPM proxy host settings for Lemmy for the following paths.

/api

/feeds

/pictrs

/nodeinfo

They should point to the container that is running the lemmy application, not the UI one, just the lemmy one and to port 8536. If your NPM is not on the same docker network as lemmy, you will need to expose port 8536 on the lemmy container and add it to the lemmyexternalproxy network.

If those changes don’t bring you joy, try also adding the following lines to the “advanced” tab of your NPM proxy host settings for Lemmy.

proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $remote_addr;

real_ip_header X-Real-IP;

real_ip_recursive on;

If anything I have said is confusing to you, please reach out via DM and I’ll try to help.

Sorry, I must have missed that point in my first read through. I think we will see a lot of changes with Lemmy as development proceeds. It seems like that particular 404 is being generated in the Lemmy software rather than the webserver portion because that is not a standard 404 message. So instead of generating that message it could probably be fixed to kick off a “manual” search instead of generating an error. We will have to leave that to the Lemmy devs though.

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?

Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I’m sorry that I assumed you didn’t know how to do that. I meant no offense but there’s no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.

There’s no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don’t know what the plans are.

At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don’t here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.