Using Docker is not much harder, actually, at least if you go the docker compose route. You download the docker-compose.yml file, the example config file, and the nginx config file, fill in your domain in the right places, and run docker compose up -d.

The database will provision itself and Lemmy will run all the migrations. Caveat: don’t be a smartass like me, the migrations need the Lemmy user to be a superuser so if you use an existing database, you need to either grant temporary superuser permissions or you need to do some manual migrating.

You need an HTTPS certificate, but if you follow the guide that can be set up in as little as two commands (sudo snap install --classic certbot, sudo certbot -d yourdomain.com).

The only problem I ran into was that somehow my admin account wasn’t activated. I had to manually enable it (docker compose exec -ti postgres psql, update local_user set accepted_application = true).

If you want a challenge, perhaps consider installing Kbin instead. It mostly interoperates with Lemmy and Mastodon (though it uses boosts (“retweets”) rather than likes for upvotes so you may annoy Mastodon people) and it’s more manual work to set up, has more optional features to explore (such as S3 file hosting, which you can combine with self-hosted S3 like Minio if you want even more of a learning experience). It also looks better in my opinion.

As for the droplet: I don’t know your requirements, but I’m hosting most of my stuff on Contabo because it’s a lot cheaper. I probably wouldn’t host a business site on there, but it’s perfect for hobby projects. You can also try Oracle’s free tier*, which has a slightly annoying bandwidth cap of 50mbps but gives you a free/several free (ARM) server(s) with up to 24GB of RAM.

*: Oracle is a terrible company to do business with, make sure not to buy anything from them. After your first month you’ll get a phone call from a marketeer, your special cloud credits disappear, and you can keep using your free servers indefinitely.