I had a Mastodon instance 9 months ago. I couldn’t upgrade it because I would need good 101-level help for that. So I totally messed up with Git, and long story short: I deleted my server and made a promise never again.
Well, “never” is a relative term, as time itself is, so I started a new instance today. I put it this way—it took so long that my DNS settings had enough time to change through the universe.
An endless amount of copy and paste. A few hiccups along the way. Sure, my mistakes, like one missed apt update and corepack enable of Yarn didn’t work. Or when I was giving details of the database, I accidentally mentioned Docker, and the connection was refused. Compiling Ruby took so long that I was almost sure it had crashed, because nothing was shown to me.
The system offered me the ability to try email, but credentials were never asked for.
But the most annoying thing was the constant jumping between a browser and shell because of the almost endless amount of copy and paste.
Now my new instance is up and running. It took close to four hours and three cups of coffee.
When I started my first Discourse, it took one cup of coffee, something like 30-40 minutes, a few copy and paste rounds, and everything worked as promised and right away—even the notorious email.
In the virtual world, there are two easy installs: WordPress and Discourse. WordPress is maybe a bit faster, but with Discourse, there isn’t a struggle with the database.
Everything else is built from devs to devs.
So, thanks to the team for easy access to start new forums and Happy New Year—your way is the best for 101-level professional copypasters.