this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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For some months now, I've been trying to set up an Mbin instance, since as it's more manual than the other softwares I found, and I understand things better if I can see the logic behind them. I'd rather do that before going for automated processes where if something breaks, I don't know how to handle. However, trying to figure things out as I go, it's so much stuff that I figured out instead what I knew was very little.

As I was also interested in hosting other sites, this made me reevaluate things, and turns out several things I don't know, like how to host two sites in a same machine, how to handle horizontal attacks, what some tools are used for, etc.

So going back to the title, what to study? Maybe some specific book? Private classes/courses? Online tutorials? Something else? Just no university suggestion, please - from experience, they are extremely shallow at best.

Thanks in advance!

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Start simple, then work your way up. Construct a static website with HTML. Learn how to navigate folders on a (remote) server, so the Linux commandline. Learn how to install software and where to find the configuration and logfiles. Then install some webserver and make it serve your first website. You can do all of this on your own computer. And after that you can learn how to install other web applications, how to reconfigure your webserver to act as a reverse proxy.

So start with basic webdevelopment first, then do Linux, webservers, and then once you got the basics you can do more advanced apps, containers and all the stuff.

Not sure which book to recommend. But I often recommend https://yunohost.org/ to people who just want to run webservices. It does most of the complicated stuff for you and you just need to click install for software in YunoHost's catalog. You just need to learn a few basic things about the internet, because it's fairly easy to use.

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 3 points 3 months ago

Thanks for explaining the path!

About Yunohost... (rambly comment ahead)I'm aware of it, but avoiding for the reason of learning manually, and also because, as an end user, I don't like any of the ActivityPub-compatible softwares they offer. Also the amount of troubleshooting I did for people that would press triangle¹ early on in Autoplugin for the PS Vita sure helped making me very wary of automated processes without understanding them.

¹Triangle made all homebrew plugins listed in Autoplugin get installed, including experimental and incompatible ones. Also been some ~7 years since the function got removed and I never used it myself, but the problem was so widespread I remember down to the key used for running it... 🥹