> I wanted to check out Mastodon and looked into setting up a node. It's a nightmare of rube goldberg machine dependency hell. It's not that I can't, but that I don't have time to mess with it.

I've come to the conclusion lately that the thing holding decentralization back the most is that sunning any kind of server-side code is challenging to set up and a regular pain in the neck to maintain.

This prevents even tech-savvy people from setting up their own nodes of whatever cool tech happens to come out (not just social networks, but RSS readers, bookmarking apps, you name it: there is an OSS thing out there that fits your needs but is a PIA to install and run.)

And in turn this limits the number of nodes that will ever run on a decentralized service, and nodes will constantly go offline as admins get fed up with running them. We need the ability to install and run server software as easily (almost) as we can install something on our phones.

Maybe a layer on top of Ubuntu Server, with a baked in web UI so that any Joe can get a DO droplet and start serving.