If you’re afraid of the CLI then you probably didn’t be hosting anything complex yourself. The CLI is one of the least complicated parts of server administration.

Look at installing Gentoo, or Arch, or Alpine vs Ubuntu. There’s no technical reason we can’t make Gentoo installation GUI. It’s just going to be very very tedious. Orders of magnitude more tedious.

At the same time Gentoo allows you to customize WAAAAY more things during its install than Ubuntu.

So specifically for lemmy - yeah we can probably make some sort of default AWS image where you just select it when spinning up new VM and you’re up and running. But what if you want something slightly different? Maybe you prefer MySQL instead of Postgres. Or Apache instead of nginx, or maybe you want images hosted on a different machine. Suddenly it’s the install GUI author’s responsibility to support install of 10 different databases, or load-balancers, or something else, and each one has their own GUI options. Then someone else wants 11th database added and it has 10 more custom options…. Oh and now someone else is asking for a DigitalOcean image instead… or and now someone’s asking for Docker image… You see where this is going.

I’ve been working on getting Matrix Synapse running on my NAS, and the CLI hasn’t been my problem. I’m a programmer, and CLI doesn’t scare me; but the other issues you mention are all new to me, and getting a web service set up so people outside my local network can access it but without leaving me open to bad actors is wicked stressful.

The biggest problems end up being that I need to work with the soup of technologies, and there’s no one place to do all the things. I’ve got TWO routers (because my internet comes through one, and I run my LAN and wifi off one I trust better) which means I’m double-NATed, which is apparently the root of all evil; I can use Cloudflare to tunnel to my NAS, but I can’t accept simple (CNAME) redirects from a family member’s domain to one of my subdomains without paying Cloudflare $200/month, so that means I’m back to dealing with the double-NAT, and then I have to learn setting up TLS, which sounds like it’s simple, but still it’s jimmy way another thing to screw around with and another thing I could screw up on accident.

I could pay for a VPS, but that to me defeats a lot of the point of “host your own” federation when some company could be subpoenaed for copies of all their hosted accounts or something. (Yes, I could get subpoenaed for my data just as easily, but it takes more work to subpoena a thousand people than one company for a thousand people’s accounts.)

Anyway, I’d love to see things evolve to where it’s easy for newbies to host their own private instances of everything.

Personally, I’d love a drop-in tool that runs more like a temporary server while it’s running, syncing federated data you missed while your device was off; and only serving your data when it’s on. Likely with some kind of redirect service/NAT punchthrough so other clients can find you…

…but I think we’re a long way off from being able to do that.

Do we actually need people afraid of CLIs to host anything? Sounds like a hassle.