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Rented a VPS from https://hostwinds.com. Went for the managed tier just to have less things to think of while learning

Actually I would have went for just getting an instance from https://masto.host, but the registration was closed when I tried. So I figured I’d rent a VPS and learn along the way.

Would also enable me to run other services :)

Last night I was considering other ActivityPub implementations (GoToSocial, Friendica, etc) which would have been okay since, after searching around, I found I could still use Mastodon apps with them

And just skimming the instructions for setting up Mastodon, I had the impression that it will not be easy. Friendica's PHP+MySQL to me seemed the most familiar.

gotosocial, being written in Go, was also attractive to me because I've been looking for a project to play around and learn the programming language with... so I thought maybe I could even submit some PRs when I use that

After looking for solutions for "moving" accounts, I realized it will not be easy going from Mastodon to others https://fosstodon.org/@ayo/109543104405658262

Yeah, small reason maybe, but I just did not want to start a new account so here I am this morning, just done with Mastodon's "Preparing your machine" instructions.

Maybe when I moved the account to my own instance and the database is complete I can explore writing my own APIs :)

Now installing the requirements for Mastodon. Some thoughts:
- Their docs assume Ubuntu 20.4 is the OS you have. This is good because there’s a huge community behind Ubuntu and you’re more likely to get help when you need it
- there’s an instruction to set up Ruby and their package manager bundler. I did not have a good experience with this before, so I’m a bit worried here —though they suggested a tool they said will make it easier: rbenv

Oh wait, I want to thank a few people

@Graycot for answering my questions re: vps and self-hosting

@abel also for chatting about mastodon admin stuff and self-hosting in general

@matthew from whom I first learned about gotosocial

@daniel for mentioning friendica, and going through a lot of setting up instances himself and therefore showing it could be fun

Now setting up PostgreSQL. Looks straightforward, should be familiar if you’ve done this before. I do like that they include an optional performance configuration.

This tutorial by DigitalOcean just dropped. Looks streamlined and the website is easier to navigate!

Thanks @kaasbaas for mentioning!

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-mastodon-on-ubuntu-20-04

Okay I’m switching over to the Digital Ocean tutorial. Confirmed they just follow the recommendations of the Mastodon team, and so far the website is easier to follow and I’m more confident here that dependencies are updated

Should have mentioned this earlier. Mastodon needs 3 package managers:

- apt (Linux)
- yarn (node.js)
- bundler (ruby gems)

For installing Mastodon from source, we use git — which means we can easily pull patches later, and switching versions is as easy as “git checkout”

I resist the urge to fork the repo for now less branching

Oh look: it's easy to try release candidates!

Still waiting for bundler to finish installing gems. It pauses a lot and doesn’t show some kind of “loading” progress so you don’t know where you are.

Okay, bundler is done with a bunch of “IMPORTANT!” and deprecation messages.

Not sure if I need to do anything about these —will just proceed

Ah, thanks Digital Ocean for some assurance:

"Once this finishes, there is a lot of output at the end that may appear like it needs to be acted upon. However, you can safely proceed without additional action required."

Never thought #a11y is this bad on package managers. Please consider users need assurances on CLIs and TUIs too (maybe even more so)

@bigshans I’m being stubborn here and going through their instructions as they are written