A thread on the Fediverse infected my curiosity with the question: How small of a server can GoToSocial run on and still give a decent user experience for a single-user instance? Let’s find out.

Introduction

I’m writing this just before hopping on a long trans-atlantic flight. I’m not betting on the in-flight WiFi being very good, so I’m taking the time to get a local AI assistant running on my laptop. I think many travelers will be interested in setting something like this up, so I’d like to take the time to document a lot of how I’m doing this… and hopefully make it easier for others to get it going.

A comprehensive guide to installing and configuring Podman on MacOS as a free, open-source alternative to Docker for running containerized applications locally