Quite a few people have had issues trying to get a Lemmy instance setup, and in a lot of cases it seems to be an issue with the documentation missing something or not being super clear (not blaming the devs btw, they have a LOT on their plate these days).
With the influx of users that are going to be coming to Lemmy over the next while, being able to get new instances setup is going to be critical, so anything that could improve the installation documentation, the Docker and Ansible examples, etc., which in turn will also reduce the number of installation support requests the Lemmy devs get, would be a huge help.
I spent a few days trying to get a lemmy instance going through docker before throwing in the towel and just using the ansible method. This limits the amount of customizability, but the docker documentation is currently completely wrong. There are a few PRs open to fix this, but only the repo owners can approve, so we’re basically waiting on that.
I’m inclined to agree.
I was able to sus out the appropriate incantations for getting it up and running using docker from info that was already in issues/pull requests, but at this point I think it’s up to the maintainers to accept those pull requests to update the docs.
Agreed. It would be really helpful if we had a troubleshooting doc with tips on how to solve all the different errors that can happen when you run docker compose. (And for any errors that can happen after that, which I wouldn’t know about cuz I haven’t gotten that far yet)
I tried the “From Scratch” method and failed miserably.
Nowadays everything is “step 1: install docker” which is a valid tool, but it’s not the all-around solution for everything.
Indeed. Also my failure comes from the rather unwelcome way of lemmy failing: “Error!” message on the UI without any error in any log, indicating any problems. I ws thinking about trying to debug it but needs lots of hours just to figure out how they imagined debugging…
The documentation was put together by people that have a detailed knowledge of things and have lots of technical experiencr. I have a feeling that if some things are missing, it’s probably because they assume that someone setting this up already had a certain level of experience and therefore would already know what to do. More than likely they didn’t feel that every tiny step was needed as there would be a certain amount of common knowledge already.
And the more people who can fill in the “expected common knowledge” gap, the more people can learn the basics.
Common knowledge isn’t the information everyone knows, honestly far from it. Common knowledge is knowledge everyone could benefit from.
