• why use two networks, instead they shouldn't expose any internal ports if using reverse proxy container within compose (I'm using a separate external load balancer/reverse proxy, so I exposed lemmy & lemmy-backend only);
• stuff like hostname: shouldn't be needed because it matches service name;
• instead of using generic nginx container image with custom nginx.conf you need to place somewhere manually they should pre-build a container which would work OOTB with the compose setup, this would also solve current situation where nginx.conf and compose file are seemingly maintained separately because they don't match (i had to change one to match the other);
• a minor thing but i would appreciate environment-based setup instead of needing configuration files (lemmy.hjson) on the filesystem (my ansible-based container deploy system has provisions for this stuff, still its something that i'd rather not have to use...);
• in general compose setup feels like development environment because of all the debugging that is enabled, i think it also tries to build one of lemmy components instead of using an image by default;

it's all minor stuff, really, but it adds up and people who are not particularly savvy might give up on self-hosting lemmy because of if. so some polish and cleanup might be a good idea.

i know there's an ansible role too but i haven't looked through it. i have to do way too much ansible code review & refactoring at work. :)

I've followed the official guide on how to set it up using docker. I had to tweak the compose file in a way it was not mentioned in the docs. Also I have an already set up nginx web server and while I was able to set up a reverse proxy vhost to the reverse proxy that was defined in the compose I wasn't able to get websocket working. I thought of removing the proxy entirely from the compose file and configure the "main" nginx server for lemmy, I just gave up and removed everything because I felt like it doesn't worth the time.