Pleroma is an open source social network platform that is a part of the Fediverse. In this write-up, I will be describing my experience with installing the OTP release on a Linux VM in Google Cloud by following the official documentation.

For someone who works with Kubernetes clusters daily and deploys to them using Helm, the idea of manually configuring a VM to run my application is an adorable flashback to a simpler time. It brings me back to my days as a student systems administrator at Oregon State or the very early days wherein I would run Unreal Tournament servers from my home Linux computer. Are you feeling the nostalgia?

Despite working for Facebook a few years ago, I’m not a huge fan of the platform. I think that attempting to cram every human being on the planet into one massive social network without any concept of community enforcement is counterproductive and antithetical to how humans are capable of socializing. We evolved to interact with small bands of hunter-gatherers, not thousands of individuals via highly abstract proxies for interaction such as Likes and Hearts. This has been written about in much more detail than I can do justice by many people much smarter than me so I won’t attempt my own “hot take” on it. If you are curious about the concept, look into Dunbar’s Number.