I spawned up a LXC in my Proxmox for it as soon as the Reddit fiasco began. Originally tried the Docker way, failed… My Docker is installed the official way by the way. Tried the “install from scratch” way, also failed… Finally gave the source a casual read and decided to compile it from source.

The pict-rs bit is a hassle. It has taken me some time to get all the dependencies right and compile Imagemagick version 7 for Ubuntu 22.04 from source. But it worked eventually.

I then installed the rust toolchain and checked out the latest stable release tag at the time aka 0.17.3 and compiled lemmy. Nothing went astray and I followed the remaining steps in the “install from scratch” doc to complete the setup. P.S. Oh right you need to make the lemmy PostgreSQL user SUPERUSER otherwise the database migration script would not work. A commit was already made to make it unnecessary. It will make its way to 0.18.0 release I guess.

I initially encountered some issues in federation. Subscriptions stuck at pending for remote instances, regardless of their size and traffic. I tried many ways and still it did not work. I have thought of axing the container and restarting from the beginning.

While I was weighing my options, I found an advice in an issue at lemmy GitHub repo that suggested the problem was leftover from previous hostname changes and dumping the existing database and recreating from sketch would help. I have indeed altered the hostname once or twice during setup. So I followed the advice and federation is working now.

So far not a butter smooth experience but not the worst either. It does take some troubleshooting capacity and patience. But heck selfhosting has been like that since time immemorial.