> 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.

The thing is, a lot of that complication is caused by things like user registration, permissions systems, etc. which (a) aren't particularly relevant when running a node for onesself and (b) are probably the most vulnerable attack surfaces.