Preparing to Install Mastodon on Reclaim Cloud

The following video tutorial takes you through the process of preparing to install Mastodon on a virtual private server (VPS) in Reclaim Cloud. I’ve installed a few servers now, and based on that experience it makes sense to break things up into two distinct processes. The first is preparing to install mastodon, which includes figuring out your domain name, setting up transactional email, as well as cloud storage. Having those all setup ahead of time will make the second process, namely installing Mastodon, that much simpler.

So, what is covered in the above video are the following pieces:

  • 1:40 –>4:15 -Spinning up a Debian 11.5 VPS on Reclaim Cloud with public IPv4 address and at least 4 GB of CPU*
  • 4:15–>6:50 -Managing DNS for Domain in Cloudflare
  • 6:50–>17:00  -Creating a transactional email account on Mailgun and adding DNS records to Cloudflare
  • 17:00–>27:30 -Setting up an AWS S3 bucket for cloud storage of media files.†
  • 27:30–>29:30 -Pointing server IPv4 in Reclaim Cloud to domain in Cloudflare.

I’ll be working on screenshots and a more definitive guide for Reclaim Hosting’s support documentation, but in the interest of time and sanity I am setting this one free for now so I can get part 2 out directly, which covers actually installing Mastodon on the server you spun up and prepared for.

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*I would not run it on less, even if a personal instance, and for a community instance that is a good starting point, but you’ll probably need more.

†As of Mastodon 4.0.3 you can use Digital Ocean’s object storage Spaces as opposed to Amazon’s S3, and given how much simpler Spaces is than S3 I highly recommend it. I will be working on a guide for that sometime soon.

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