Came here to say the Ansible method is much, much easier than manual with Docker and from scratch.
I was banging my head for hours fixing all kinds of errors. I finally gave up and went the Ansible method and was able to get to the Lemmy login page within 5 minutes.
OP, if you decide to go the Ansible method, you’ll need to setup a separate server and install Ansible on it. From there clone the Git repo and modify the files the instructions tell you to. Make sure the two servers can talk to each other via SSH. Lastly, run the “ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts lemmy.yml” command and your Lemmy instance should be online within a few minutes.
Honestly, my advice is to setup two temp VPS’s with Ubuntu on them. Don’t lock them down too tight and play with the Ansible deployment. Once you get a feel for how everything goes, you can redeploy the VPS’s and set them up properly with proper security.