I finally managed to selfhost Lemmy and Matrix, now it is time to also get a selfhosted Mastodon instance up. A few questions before I start:

I did some research into the topic and it seems that Mastodon doesn’t like to run behind an existing reverse proxy and there are quite a few tweaks necessary to get it running - can someone confirm this? Or is this something easily set up?

I’m currently leaning to run it on a dedicated VPS (due to the issue above and also because it seems to need quite a bit of disk space) - this opens up to do a non-docker installation and follow the official install path. Do you think this will make it easier to keep it updated to new releases in the future?

If going with a docker install there seem to be quite a few problems with updating (at least a lot of threads discussing failed update procedures sprung up when I googles “mastodon docker update”) - can someone confirm? Are there easy to follow guides for a docker based update routine?

Right now it seems the easiest would be to run on a dedicated server, follow the native installation procedure and use the templates provided for nginx, certbot, … thoughts?

  • RxBradEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    If you do use Docker, Mastodon seems to be a prime example of where you shouldn’t use the : latest tag and autoupdate with something like Watchtower.

    I initially installed with :latest a few days ago and it gave me 4.1.3 (the actual latest version had been 4.1.4 for quite awhile at that point). I saw other people mention that they “updated” to a 3.x release via :latest recently.