I set up Mastodon to give it a try a few months ago and I share your pain, as someone used to old-school unix sysadmin it seems pretty ridiculously complicated

I set up Mastodon to give it a try a few months ago and I share your pain, as someone used to old-school unix sysadmin it seems pretty ridiculously complicated and you basically have to input a bunch of docker commands and hope that whatever tutorial you're following doesn't open too many security vulnerabilities. That being said that's just the modern webdev bloated and unoptimized stack. Go fast, break things and if it doesn't work you can probably solve it by adding another layer or three on top of it. We can complaint all we want about it but clearly modern web developers prefer to work with these technologies (and sometimes for very good reasons), it's not like we can force them to do things our way.