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.
Can’t comment on the Ansible/Lemmy side of things, but I ran a mailserver in DO for years. IIRC I had to file a ticket for them to unblock port 25 outgoing, and IPv6 was a no-go entirely (because they assign individual IPs instead of a /64 for instances like they should, or maybe just too small a range I forget).
I would suggest using some mailer service (mailgun, SES, postmark, etc.) unless you are fully invested in actually running a mailserver and all the fun deliverability issues that can ensue.