Oh god, this. Yesterday, I went looking for stuff to self-host a little spreadsheety-type thing to share with a client, so I can just point them at a web page with a list of domains and they can tick off the ones to renew or allow-to-expire or whatever, without having to send actual spreadsheets or CSV files back and forth over and over. But everything seems to be so heavy; full Excel clones and the like. And when I finally decided to look into one in more detail (nocodb I think) it turns out not to have sane installation instructions — which seems to be getting more and more common these days.

Incidentally, am I the only one who thinks it's insane that everything requires docker or pip or npm or whatever the hell other custom packaging system to mess around with my system these days and doesn't have instructions on how to just… y'know, run the program? Like, you have to either have the developers' whole f'ing laptop running on your server, or allow some weird packaging system to download random files that may have been updated with malware since last time the upstream author looked and squirrel away files god-knows-where on a live server? Plus when I looked at the build script the first thing it does it *stop and destroy* a container!? What if there's data in there? What if it's not named the same on this machine? Everything these days feels so absolutely *horrible* in the name of making things "simple" for the utterly clueless to run stuff they haven't the faintest idea how to run, who will then talk to other utterly clueless people on forums and cargo-cult their way into blowing up their entire machine trying to make something work again after they make a simple mistake or the overly-simplified instructions fail to perfectly align with their system.

What I *want* from an install document is:

1. What pieces there are
2. How to run those pieces
3. How to configure those pieces to talk to each other and/or other equivalent/substitutable pieces

I don't want some script, docker thingy, etc that tries to do it all for me and potentially screws up the whole server.

I don't want *apparently* simple at the expense of everything else. I just want a basic, high-level explanation of how the parts fit together. Proper documentation and a lack of overly-complex layers of abstraction over the top of the build/install/run process would be so nice, thank you.

I suppose what I want is a standard straightforward unix-style daemon with a man page. So many of those do it right. You read the man page, it gives you full details of what it does and how to configure it to talk to anything else it needs to talk to, and you run it, and it does its thing. And you do the same for the other components. And there's usually an overview man page that tells you what components there are. It's just so nice when that happens.

I guess it's because unix was *designed* for sysadmins like me.

kopper [according to whom?] :colon_three:

2024-06-03 08:05:21

activitypub.ghost.org/day3/

When you build an open source product, a critical factor that determines adoption is how easy it is to self-host. It is, quite possibly, the single biggest predictor of success. WordPress got this very right, and it's a big part of why it still occupies such a large part of the market today.

Unfortunately, most modern apps are not straightforward to host. They're generally made up of multiple apps, servers, services, data stores, specific providers, proprietary external APIs, and often a whole other system to orchestrate everything. That's not a big problem for a centralised product which only has to be hosted in 1 place by 1 team, who built it themselves... but it's a fairly major problem when you're expecting a product to be installed and adopted by developers all over the world who have never used it before.

louder for the people in the back

I think you'll find it's a little more complicated than that

The sun is shining, the BBQ is sizzling, and it's Friday — which means it's time for your weekly dose of "only-mildly-unhinged" (according to one subscriber) updates about ActivityPub in Ghost. Welcome back. First, some house keeping.

^{Ghost (Building ActivityPub)}