"a website" apparently means a lot more to you than it does to me. I can find cheap apache hosting or run it on a VM somewhere (or at home on my own system) and host websites with abandon.

Author appears to desire "a discussion system" or facebook-alike as a minimal function level.

This sounds a lot like "i want to fly without all that pesky machinery. why can't someone make it so i can flap my arms and do it?"

For the record, I'm not waiting for someone to make it. It's what I want to make.

In which case I wish you the best of luck and salute your ambition.

Take a look at the "how to spin up a mastodon instance" docs, for example: how are you going to avoid all that complexity? I don't think you will. You'll either just hide it from the user (and make it impossible to adapt to any purpose you didn't anticipate, ala Apple), or you'll have the same bewildering forest of switches, options, and dependencies just stacked up in a form more pleasing to you (and hopefully others).

I'm not saying this to be discouraging. I just think you've got a false concept of how simple the goal is.

Thanks for the hint. I'll mastodon to the list of complicated products in the article (in case you didn't notice, I already mentioned Ghost, Wordpress, and Discourse).

The only thing I don't intend to get rid of (at least at the beginning) is the need to buy a domain name. Everything else will be managed by the program. Even renting a VPS will be optional because you have the option to run on your local machine.

> I'm not saying this to be discouraging. I just think you've got a false concept of how simple the goal is.

Thanks for the concern. I've done this before at a smaller scale and I know you don't need any forest of switches and options.

It seems like using a web hosting service that provides one click Wordpress installs would solve most of your problems. Plus there is no lock in. You can export all the content and import it into another Wordpress instance pretty easily.