I operate my own homelab and have a background in SRE, so I figured I'd try out the same. I've wrangled a Mastodon instance install before, so this couldn't be too hard, right?
My approach started by using containers via lxc as a quick and dirty way of getting a development environment that enabled me to figure out if it worked and then see if I could then wrap it into a proper docker container and look at potentially publishing that.
On my first attempt, I did the manual route. I skipped the redis, rabbitmq, and postgres installs as I already operate those elsewhere on the network, but I got everything else running. Unfortunately, I also experienced the 500 errors. Most of the front page loaded, except for the content where the 500 error was displayed. Even with some digging around, I couldn't find a clear path to figuring out what was causing the 500 error, as the Mercure hub was seeing subscribers connect and disconnect. Gave up.
I then figured maybe the docker route might be easier/streamlined. I'm not a fan of duplicating services, but I thought that if the core workflow was solid enough, I could put effort into splitting them apart and go from there. Unfortunately, I don't even get past the docker-compose build for dev. Docker compose hangs forever.