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I am very aware of what it takes to run a small instance, you are indeed correct that domain registration is not the hardest part.
What is the hardest part? Aside from funding if it's a personal one. I have a domain I'm barely using and I can think of a funny lemmy url but I think it's still probably more time and work than I'll get out of it at the moment
Honestly it depends on what your experience level with running software is and what you want out of it. For me things have been rather smooth sailing as I already host a number of things for myself (so know all about domains, DNS, servers, reverse proxies, docker, etc.) and I am the only one actively using my instance right now so (local or admin-level) moderation isn't really an issue either.
You lose me at docker. Maybe when I have more time I'll research it more.
Docker isn't super necessary, there are some scripts out there that hide a good bit of how it works like the official ansible playbook or lemmy-easy-deploy.
I use docker to easily run many pieces of software in isolation from each other, it's like VMs if you're familiar with those, but different in some key ways that don't really matter for this discussion.
I am familiar with VMs. Thanks for the info.