How to self-host Mastodon

The guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough for self-hosting a Mastodon instance, an open-source, decentralized social media platform that operates through the ActivityPub protocol. It outlines the necessary components such as Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, and others, and emphasizes the use of Docker for containerized application management. The guide also details the process of setting up the instance on the Fly.io platform, including creating a new app, setting up domain and app secrets, provisioning databases with Neon for PostgreSQL and Upstash for Redis, and configuring email services with providers like Postmark. It concludes with instructions for deploying the instance and optional steps for enabling file uploads via AWS S3, aiming to equip users with the knowledge to independently deploy and manage their own Mastodon instance.