Yeah, I feel like exposing ports 80 and 443 towards an up to date nginx/whatever is referred to as a super dangerous thing in this community and also the selfhosted subreddit. Recommending cloudflare is almost the default, which I find a bit sad given many people selfhost to escape the reliance on big monopolist companies.

One can add different layers of security of course, but having nginx with monitoring in it’s own VM without keys to jump to another VM is enough of risk mitigation for me.

I think the best thing of reddit is them having so many actually active niche subreddits. Many people saying Lemmy doesn’t need to grow don’t seem to care much about that which surprises me a bit.

You got quite good answers already, here and in the other thread.

My suggestion is to not start with pixelfed but something else (simple stuff like dokuwiki, you can use it to document your stuff while you’re at it) to get an understanding of the whole process (running the service itself, making it available to the internet after hardening your infrastructure a bit etc).

Also, if you’re not settled for how to do it exactly, give Docker a try. There’s a reason it’s popular among selfhosters!