That derek.jpg sure looks shady.

C’mon. The scripts are public, you can inspect them before running them. The other alternative is to explain line by line the hundreds of lines in the scripts. Not very practical.

While i agree, the issue is the target audience. If this was directed at more technical and knowledgeable tech-savvy people one-upping their game, i would be very glad and thankful for a shell script. However, its not. Its a potential starting point for being, in cool nerd terms, webmaster, and that has its own set of responsibilites and habits, habits like not downloading files and packages without checking first. While some might change the habit after learning more, i doubt that many will do that.

If we don’t want to call the HN crowd non-technical

My previous version of https://sive.rs/ti (until a few hours ago) had no shell script, but just walked people through every step. It took like 50+ hours to write up.

But so many people were getting stuck and frustrated trying to type in all those commands, (and mistaking "l" for "1" and such), that I realized I could help more people have their own server if I put most of those steps into a shell script.

Hopefully it'll be enough to give them a taste of the benefits of having their own server, then they can learn more about the steps afterwards.

While i get the pain of users, i've observed that habits stick and only a weak 5-20% of the learners actually drop convenient-but-insecure habits (downloading untrusted files without inspection beforehand) because convinence always wins over. I wouldnt change the system but definitely mention (more than once) the risks involved with what they are doing at the moment and to inspect the code later when they learn more.

Everyone has to start somewhere