Ease of deployment
How quickly can you set up a server?
Installing software on Linux isn’t always the easiest, and if it was, magazines such as this one would have a hard time justifying their existence. If your aim is to deploy and run your own social media server, you don’t want to waste time going through a complicated installation process, trawling through GitHub issues, or following a step-by-step guide to compiling and configuring multiple components from source.
Ideally you should be able to get your fediverse server up and running in under an hour – or an afternoon at most. Complicated setups are a definite disadvantage if you want to start getting social in a hurry, while a one-liner install script would be ideal. In testing our five fediverse servers for ease of setup, we count the time and complexity of getting the server and web interface up and running on a local network. You need to take additional steps to get it working behind a reverse proxy, secured and open to the web. The additional steps are fairly standard, and involve creating a CONF file for Apache, and running Certbot.
There are official and unofficial ways of deploying each instance, and if there was an easy deployment solution available, we were willing to dive down a rabbit hole of third-party tutorials.
Mastodon and Akkoma came out very well, with both offering Docker installation out of the box. Assuming you have Docker and Docker Compose already installed…
Installing Akkoma, Lemmy, and Misskey on a VPS was simplicity itself, and after cloning the GitHub repository, we needed to do very little else to generate and bring up the Docker containers using Docker Compose. Akkoma was especially easy thanks to the instance generation script, which asks a handful of commonsense questions about the server. For all three, we could access our shiny new fedi server within 20 minutes of starting.
Mastodon was slightly more difficult – despite using Docker and Docker Compose, it involved creating multiple directories, generating secret keys and configuring environment files. Still, we were proud to see our instance front page in around an hour.
Pixelfed was the most time-consuming, as there isn’t an official Docker image. You need to set up and migrate databases, configure PHP, and more. That said, it’s still very doable.