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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I'm not sure what you mean? Most people are just self hosting instances for themselves, where email isn't needed. My instance doesn't have an email service.
And as I explained, if email is something you want, I have an advanced option for this. It's not the default because there is not a public VPS host out there that lets you use port 25 without special approval.
Email config is needed for lost passwords. It's also needed for account verification, if you run without verification you could easily become a place for people to abuse other servers and get yourself defederated.
Many web hosts have poisoned mail IPs, so setting up with a smtp config to a well known site server is required if you want your emails to be delivered.
And that is why I don't advertise this as supporting email out of the box, and why it's an advanced option without any support from me. The embedded postfix server is part of the official Docker Compose deployment from upstream Lemmy, and it's part of the officially supported Ansible deployment too. Those deployment methods are what this is modeled after. That is as far as I go on email support. If upstream Lemmy started including some automatic AWS SNS configuration, I would adopt it, but they have not done so.
Everyone who has reported success to me so far are running single user instances for themselves. That is my target audience, and for that audience (and myself), email is not even close to being a hard requirement.
However, if you would like to improve this script by adding support for more robust and secure email systems, I would be happy if you submitted a PR to do just that :)
Don't lose your passwords and leave closed registration so only people you actually want on your instance are on it. You absolutely do not need email.
You can't have the checkbox for federation and private, the server will crash and tell you that in the lemmy log. Had that happen when I did thy to setup without email the first time.
Private and federation are mutually exclusive concepts. Private instances are ones that intentionally don’t federate - like a private company community that’s locked to their intranet. For self hosted Lemmy instances you just need to close registration. Then since no one can apply, the only use case for email becomes the Forgot Password button for if you forget your password and at that point you’re better served with a password manager.
Weird. I used this script with no working email. How's it going from my private instance that is federated?
"Private instance" and "disable registration" are not the same thing. There are separate options for both. It is possible to run a federated single-user instance with registrations disabled. That's how I run mine.