Took me too many hours, but I now have my own Mastodon instance up and running.
For something that was built to transfer social networking power back to the community, it was pretty complicated to get it up and running. Don’t get me wrong - I absolutely love the project, and believe it’s a fantastic application, but there were so many steps to follow, and a lot of it (most?) is something I would not expect an average user to be able to do.
I’m actually not sure what I expected, honestly. A huge project that handles communications between other servers and hundreds, or thousands of people would surely not be small and simple… I guess I thought there would be some sort of all-in-one package and wizard to guide a person through setup. I’m not sure if that’s even really possible with something like this.
At least there is an alternative, community-owned social network at all. For now, running your own Mastodon instance is a bit biased towards the technically literate person, but there are plenty of paid services that handle the hard stuff for you; and of course, you could just sign up/create an account with an existing public server somewhere.
Maybe in the future there will a simpler install/wizard specifically for single-user-mode; remove all the complexity that has to do with moderating, user registration, network relay, etc, and strip it down to just what is needed for a single-user.