Same here. Would recommend both!

I also just recently switched to https://purelymail.com after hosting my own for several years via Mailcow and a cheap VPS. The cheap VPS was more expensive than the $10/year for Purelymail and I was only using it for mail anyway. Nothing to maintain now and so far very happy with how easy it was to move everything over.

Also, they don’t charge extra for additional domains so if you have multiple it’s still $10. Only been with them a few weeks so can’t say much yet for long term, but great so far!

I ran into this at one point as well. You can unset the private instance flag manually in the database and restart to get up and running again.

First connect to psql:

docker-compose exec postgres psql -U lemmy

Then run an update to unset the flag:

lemmy=# update local_site set private_instance = false;

Which should update 1 row (only 1 row in that table if you’re on a typical install)

I usually DIY and repurpose my old PC into a server when I upgrade. My current NAS is running on a ~10 year old i5 2500k in a (large) mid tower case packed with drives. It runs Unraid and also hosts a bunch of Docker containers for Plex, etc.

It’s definitely more work to set up than a pre-built and also more power hungry, so that’s the trade-off for the additional flexibility and lower cost of entry (at least in my case since it was mostly parts I already had). I am running low on expansion room since the 6 HDDs and 2 SSDs have about maxed out my case, but you’ll run into that same problem with pre-builts depending on how you size it.

I think some of the difficulty right now is on the presentation side. It may not be as noticable of an issue if we had a way to aggregate and view posts from related communities in a single consolidated view. I’m hoping the tooling around this will improve over time.

That’s great, glad to see progress on simplifying deployment!