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Why is it so annoyingly hard to set up a Fediverse node? (feddit.de)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Everyone (and their mother) have been trying to convince me that I should use one of my less loaded servers to be a Fediverse node. However, all Fediverse software packages I checked only support being installed on complicated systemd + Docker machines. My servers don't have either of those, because neither systemd nor Docker even exist on OpenBSD and illumos.

I know that it would be possible to manually install (e.g.) Lemmy, assuming that I won't ever need official support, but I wonder why the world outside a limited subset of the Linux ecosystem is - at most - an afterthought for Fediverse developers.

How can I help to change that?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You don't have to host a node if you don't want to.

But if you do, you may find it's surprisingly easy to set one up with very little technical knowledge. Docker has benefits in containerizing, yes, but it also makes things easy (which is why it's so popular).

In most cases you just install Linux, run through the docker install process (many VPS providers can do these first two parts for you), download a pre-made docker-compose.yml file from whichever service you are trying to run, then run "docker compose up -d" and it just works.

Running more services on the same machine, adding a reverse proxy, etc, require a bit more work. But once you have those set up it's simple to integrate further services running in docker.

But let me reiterate my first point - just because others are asking you to do something, doesn't mean you have to do it :)