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by newnewpdro 2313 days ago
Can anyone recommend a good and current guide on setting up and maintaining your own mastodon instance?
1 comments
progval 2313 days ago
The official docs at https://docs.joinmastodon.org/ should do
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newnewpdro 2313 days ago
It appears "Installing from source" is the only option?

Are there no distributions packaging mastodon and its dependencies such that I don't need to have gcc/build-essential and piles of -dev packages installed to run it?

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progval 2313 days ago
Mastodon has hundreds of Nodejs and Ruby dependencies, so it would be a huge amount of work for distributions to package it. See https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3576

FreeBSD's ports used to have Mastodon, but they gave up because it kept breaking https://www.freshports.org/net-im/mastodon/

You can however run Mastodon with docker, many people use the official docker-compose.yml config.

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newnewpdro 2313 days ago
Yikes, do you know of any activitypub-compatible implementations actually packaged by distros? gnu social perhaps? diaspora?

I checked out Pleroma after seeing it mentioned on that freshports mastodon page, which seemed a bit less onerous with just the OTP component but they don't distribute an i686 build, that's unfortunately what the dusty old colo I'm looking to run this on has.

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progval 2313 days ago
Debian Sid has Diaspora: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/diaspora , but Diaspora doesn't support ActivityPub: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422#issuecommen...

As for GNU Social, well... https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/GNUSocial

You might be interested in Yunohost, which is a Debian-based distro packaging popular server applications (also with an easy installer, aimed at non-technical people): https://yunohost.org/

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newnewpdro 2313 days ago
> Debian Sid has Diaspora: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/diaspora , but Diaspora doesn't support ActivityPub: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422#issuecommen....

For posterity sake:

I just spent an hour trying to get that package happily installed in a fresh debian sid debootstrap running in nspawn and it seems to be broken. They're requiring an old 1.2.x ruby-zip version, and sid seems to only have 2.0. Even after kludging past that, things break down again on unmet sass version requirements.

So true to the 'unstable' name, this package isn't currently usable.

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