I didn’t mention the install process in my case, because the box I installed on already had Apache, which conflicted with nginx, and I couldn’t get an equivelant apache config working correctly. So in my case, it took extra steps where I migrated everything from apache to nginx on the box, and stopped using apache. But I did the install using ansible to connect from my PC to the server, and the install process itself wasn’t bad. Copy pasted the config files and made a few relevant changes like DB password, instance name, default admin credentials, and pointing to my existing SMTP mail service. For a personal instance, you could probably exclude that last step though. I already host email for my domain, so the effort to do the extra and make it work was miniscule.

After the config changes, I just put things where the lemmy-ansible repo asked, and ran it as directed. Aside from a few screwups on my part, which were mostly because I was trying to see if I could make Apache work, the install wasn’t too bad. Ansible did the heavy lifting, and if I was installing on a fresh server, I have little doubt it would have given me trouble at all.

If you ever decide to go through with trying, feel free to reach out to me. I’ll be happy to help as much as I can.