In the past few days I tried a second experiment to run my own Mastodon instance. Both to actually get a result, but also to learn how easy or hard it is to do. The first round I tried running something on a hosted domain. This second round I tried to get something running on a Raspberry Pi.

The Rapsberry Pi is a 35 Euro computer, making it very useful for stand-alone solutions or as a cheap hardware environment to learn things like programming.

Installing Debian Linux on the Rapsberry Pi

I found this guide by Wim Vanderbauwhede, which describes installing both Mastodon and Pleroma on a Raspberry Pi 3. I ordered a Raspberry Pi 3 and received it earlier this week. Wim’s guide points to another guide by on how to install Ruby on Rails and PostgresSQL on a Rapsberry Pi. The link however was dead, and that website offline. However archive.org had stored several snapshots, which I save to Evernote.

Installing Ruby on Rails went fine using the guide, as did installing PostgresSQL. Then I returned to Wim’s guide, now pointing to the Mastodon installation guide. This is where the process currently fails for me: I can’t extend the Ubuntu repositories mentioned, nor node.js.

So for now I’m stalled. I’ll try to get back to it later next week.