From the moment I read Cloudflare, I was out.

I wouldn’t recommend either Easy Deploy or lemmy-ansible. I’ve seen too many cases where those break or require more work to troubleshoot if/when something goes wrong. Both of those are just wrappers for deploying via Docker which is pretty straightforward already. The best way is to just get your hands dirty and deploy manually with Docker. You’ll have way fewer issues along the way, and troubleshooting will be easier.

Never deploy something with an easy button if you don’t understand every step the easy button takes. It’s too easy to fall into a situation where you can’t fix it until the maintainers of the easy button address the issue specific to your circumstances.

To stand up my instance, I followed the steps here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

I’ve tuned it quite a bit since then, but it all built from that base. Take things one step at a time and try to understand all you can about what’s going on in each step. Build your skills along with your instance :)

Read the docs
Understand the docs
Read the docs again
Deploy the server with the information you aquired from the docs.

RTFM again and again.