To be fair, its cousin Pleroma is comparatively easy to install
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.
Mastodon also has this reputation on its own platform.
This is not some trivial web application, it's a federated social network, and it's all laid out for you, basically up to and including steps for ensuring security and production readiness.
I am exasperated too by this stuff, and I am a professional that works with it every day (but these instructions are especially well laid out.)
I'm counting on Helm to save us. I've been admining a Jenkins server on Helm and Kubernetes and I just haven't seen the "miserable experience" I've heard of other Jenkins admins describing.
I've run several other projects using Helm and I'm convinced it's a pattern of admin-friendliness that is common to stable and well-maintained charts. They are just generally easier to work with, don't feel cobbled together, and you basically never get Configuration Drift.
But it still won't be universally easy until Kubernetes is ubiquitous. It seems easy to me now, because I've already grown accustomed to basic Kubernetes maintenance and it's mostly optional, thanks to the proliferation of managed Kubernetes providers on-the-cheap.
It's still a lot to reason about, and at my place of business the status quo is simply worse than that because of struggling with adoption.