After fighting with Discourse deployment in the past and having fun (can be either positive or negative) with MediaWiki recently, I wonder if we could make running stuff on the Internet easier for non-techies. Not a web-scale stuff, but rather something for smaller communities.
Shared hostings and throwing stuff via FTP was probably easier for some non-techies, but modern web apps are mostly written in languages other than PHP and often uses additional third-party daemons. This usually means that you need some sort of Unix-like system with console access or some vendor-specific application for a given cloud provider (Fly, Heroku, etc.).
Also, even that PHP-based software required some configuration steps before your forum/wiki/blog works - creating database, verifying permissions.
Maybe some sort of hosting-independent installer would be helpful with installation and configuration steps, leaving choosing the hosting plan to the user?
(post sponsored by increasing dependency of communities on Discord and other closed platforms)
BluRaf [annoyed by fedi hivemind]
@BluRaf@donotsta.re
