I seem to recall from reading a GitHub issue that a public cert and private key is generated for your user account upon creation. Once you start federating and interacting with other instances, the cert is distributed. When you delete the instance and start all over from scratch with the same username, now there’s a different public cert and the remote instances no longer trust your username.

I’ll try to find the GitHub issue that discusses this issue.

Came here to say the Ansible method is much, much easier than manual with Docker and from scratch.

I was banging my head for hours fixing all kinds of errors. I finally gave up and went the Ansible method and was able to get to the Lemmy login page within 5 minutes.

OP, if you decide to go the Ansible method, you’ll need to setup a separate server and install Ansible on it. From there clone the Git repo and modify the files the instructions tell you to. Make sure the two servers can talk to each other via SSH. Lastly, run the “ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts lemmy.yml” command and your Lemmy instance should be online within a few minutes.

Honestly, my advice is to setup two temp VPS’s with Ubuntu on them. Don’t lock them down too tight and play with the Ansible deployment. Once you get a feel for how everything goes, you can redeploy the VPS’s and set them up properly with proper security.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote a pretty good blog post on the legality of the Fediverse, around the time Mastodon was getting popular. It probably applies to Lemmy too. It’s worth a read to familiarize yourself of what kind of legal things you’ll be getting yourself into. You’re on the right track; you can control you and your friends’ content, but you can’t control remote content that gets pushed to your server and that’s the part to worry the most.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

One thing that stood out is to register yourself as a DMCA agent. It costs $6 or something. Having an agent on record gives instance admins certain protection.

Microsoft has a track record of having excellent uptime! /s

I find it somewhat funny that this article came out on the day Microsoft 365 had an outage for most of the day.