sirdavidxvi

Just a quick add: even for my self hosted services, I configure Postfix with Mailgun for SMTP relay for alerts and whatnot just to ensure delivery to my external mail provider.

Edit: a few words for clarity

Just passing along what I’ve read many times: that self hosting email can be difficult. Particularly sending, because the large providers tend to treat email from less known sources with more skepticism (such as by marking as spam), even with properly configured SPF and DKIM.

And if your server is down, you may miss any incoming mail for the duration. I don’t know if other providers would try resending after a period of time if the receiver is unreachable, but I doubt it (just an educated guess).

I love self hosting services but email is something I’ve decided not to touch with a ten foot pole.

+1 for Fastmail.

I’ve been using it for about 3 years. I’m on the Standard plan (middle tier). It’s $4.20/mo. per user when prepaying for 3 years and ranges up to $5.40/mo. for monthly billing.

Not sure if there’s a (practical) limit on domains or aliases, but I have 7 domains and a few aliases plus a wildcard. Includes 30GB of storage per user.

I read “server” as computer server and was really confused…

Thanks, that’s good info. If I do go forward, I was planning on going the Ansible route, though I’ve never used it before.

I’ve read that it can take a bit of time to sync when you first federate, but that after some period of time it gets closer to real-time with posts and comments.

According to the lemmy.world Instances page, lemmygrad.ml is linked, not blocked. I know it’s blocked on a number of other instances.

I’m glad that worked. I’m considering launching a personal self-hosted instance of my own, so I may be in your shoes soon enough.

How did you find the process? Did you use Docker or Ansible?

Have you tried searching for the communities first? As I understand it from some other posts, if you try to access a remote community via URL through your home instance before it “knows” about it, you’ll get the 404 error. Someone (you) on your instance has to make your instance “aware” of the remote community by searching for it first. Then, after your instance is aware of the community and federating it, you can access it via URL as you posted above.

Here’s a link: /c/houseplants@mander.xyz

Linking is a bit clunky and a lot of people post direct links to a community with its home instance URL, which causes problems when you’re browsing around. That’s an issue I hope improves over time as the software matures.