I used the Ansible playbook instructions and got my instance up and running, which is where I’m sending this from now. Still, I was not able to get the SMTP side of things working. Does this whole setup self-host SMTP on the Lemmy instance, or is it something I’ll have to sort out externally? I’ve heard some people have had issues with Digital Ocean on certain ports, which is the VPS provider I’m hosting on, but even other ports I’ve tried have not worked.
I’m on hetzner who also block port 25. I finally worked out what I needed to change to get it to work. As your using the ansible playbook, all you need to change the lines inside the .hjson file to match those of an external mail service. I used Mailersend (3000 free emails once you’re verified). If you’re using port 587 use starttls as your encryption.