https://i2p.rocks/blog/the-magical-world-of-pleroma-setting-...
Is this easier? It looks at least a bit more complicated at a glance to me. I haven't honestly tried either of them, but neither of these are simple to install. Add a config file to nginx, install erlang and use mix to grab the dependencies... these things are not totally foreign to me as a Ruby programmer, but I could see how a newbie would trip over them.
I still don't know which part people are tripping over, I'd like to hear from GP... The Pleroma doc might actually be simpler because it skips over all of the "Hardening your instance" stuff, but I'm only guessing about what people see as the hard part, since none of this looks particularly hard to me.
To be equally fair, it's really never as simple as "docker run someone/image:latest" – that's only the first step, so you can see it running. In Kubernetes terms, that's the equivalent of firing off a "run-once" pod. In other words, if that's all you did then it's not deployed yet.