Docker isn’t super necessary, there are some scripts out there that hide a good bit of how it works like the official ansible playbook or lemmy-easy-deploy.

I use docker to easily run many pieces of software in isolation from each other, it’s like VMs if you’re familiar with those, but different in some key ways that don’t really matter for this discussion.

Honestly it depends on what your experience level with running software is and what you want out of it. For me things have been rather smooth sailing as I already host a number of things for myself (so know all about domains, DNS, servers, reverse proxies, docker, etc.) and I am the only one actively using my instance right now so (local or admin-level) moderation isn’t really an issue either.

I am very aware of what it takes to run a small instance, you are indeed correct that domain registration is not the hardest part.

Just run your own instance, I say… that way it’s your fault when you forget to renew the domain name instead of the poor soul running vlemmy.

Agreed, I recommended filtering to only http(s) links in the github issue, I just made this x-post. I don’t see a strong reason to let people link to weird things like file: and data:, or deeplink to installed apps on your computer/phone. Filtering the scheme to just http(s) is how Nutomic seems to have fixed it in the backend from what I can tell (I am not a rust dev).

May the Lord have mercy on us all.

Be the change you want to see. Setting up an instance is surprisingly easy, it’s the admin stuff that will take much more time, and finding users that will probably be hard. Also scaling once you hit a certain level of size/traffic, but that’d be a good problem to have. To me the most beautiful part of the fediverse is that if you’re not finding the instance with rules/defederation/etc you want you can make that place exist.

If you are interested in doing so I’d be more than happy to give what advice or help I can.

I expect the moderators of communities to do sufficient policing of their community to make sure it follows the rules of the instance it is on and the rules of that community. If those rules permit something you disagree with (or don’t permit something you do want to see) the power is in your hands as a user to not participate or even see that community. The only way for a user to guarantee they won’t interact with someone from instance X (whether that is exploding-heads or lemmygrad or whatever you don’t like) is to only interact with communities on instances that have them defederated. There are places you can get a more curated and aggressively moderated experience, and have been recommending places such as beehaw to anyone looking for that.

I will take action against:

• Local users harassing someone
• Local users breaking local rules
• Local users repeatedly breaking remote rules
• Local communities that break local instance rules
• Remote users harassing local users
• Remote users repeatedly breaking local rules
• Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to break local rules
• Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to harass my users

The first rule on my instance is a catch-all “Be welcoming”, that will be wielded to aggressively remove far more than just “racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.

As an admin I don’t have the time or desire to police:

• Local users interacting on remote communities, so long as they are following remote rules
• Remote communities
• Remote users interacting with remote users/communities

I do hope for a way to better curate (or just disable for now) the “All” feed, at the very least for anyone who isn’t logged in. Given the general rules above that feed may include disagreeable posts, and is not a good representation of my instance or the type of community most users there will experience.