This guide has no connection to the official Mastodon project. It is the product of my personal attempts to hack together modifications for my own instance, and an attempt to help other people who want to modify their instance avoid the pain and suffering I have gone through to gather this knowledge.
Additionally, while this is titled A Beginner's Guide, I will be making some baseline assumptions about the reader's abilities and previous knowledge. Those assumptions are:
- An understanding of general programming concepts and terminology.
- A familiarity with installing, updating, and running a Mastodon instance as a system administrator.
- Familiarity with basic git commands or knowledge of how to look them up on the internet.
If you don't know React.js or Ruby on Rails, you're fine. (Honestly, I don't either.)