This seems like an ideal thing to install on an embedded system such as a Raspberry Pi.
Problem: Where are the builds?
In the installation page, you have three options: Docker, Ansible, From Scratch
I'm currently doing the from scratch option since my OS distributor is not a fan of docker or ansible (and neither am I), but the build is taking ~1hr.
Providing binary packages is kind of a futile effort since you'd need one for each distro/version and architecture. I don't like/use Docker either but it is at least a distro-agnostic format. If you want distro packages, ask your distro maintainers to package it.
Are you compiling it directly on the Pi? If so, try cross-compiling, it's going to be a lot faster that way. I just cross-compiled the server in about 5 minutes on my machine as a test.
Other packages do this though, and builds are easy to automate. Is it because it's not stable software, and so hasn't passed the usual unstable, testing, stabile repo vetting process? If so, I'm surprised, it really looks mature.
Ah cross-compiling is something I hadnt considered... do you have a preferred toolchain for this?
My preferred toolchain for most things these days, including this, is the Nix package manager. It makes cross-compiling most programs (or other similar things like compiling fully statically linked binaries, or a combination of the two) really easy, in this case with a single command, without having to deal with setting up any of the cross-compiler toolchain itself or anything else like that. It also has a huge package collection including the Lemmy packages. For example, this is the command I used for testing:
There is NixOS, the distro built on top of Nix, but Nix itself works on any distro and doesn't come into conflict with your distro's package manager, so there's no issue with having it installed in parallel.
I actually make a lot of use of the cross-compiling functionality since my router is also an armv7l box which isn't very powerful, so I cross-compile the whole NixOS system (including some custom packages) on my PC and then copy it over. It's very nice to work with.
A bit OT, but what are the storage requirements for running your own instance? I am assuming things can quickly get out of hand depending on what your server is federating with.
Short answer, not that I have seen. You could always build/package the .deb's yourself and provide them to the community, otherwise it's time the devs probably don't have for a niche use case.
You can always run another machine or traditional VM for docker (or kubernetes). Otherwise, building from scratch seems your best option.
Also, docker (or in my case kubernetes) runs just fine on a Raspberry PI (using a Pi 4 4GB). In my experience most of the overhead comes in the form of storage, since different images require difference base images which start to add up. Otherwise I haven't noticed any noticeable overhead (except with my Ceph Rook setup).