I’m running the mastodon stack in docker via a compose file. It was straight forward. Follow the instructions to the letter and it will work.

I will say that it is in your best interest to have an automated update process happen, either manually (via cron) multiple times a day or have some kind of orchestration layer that manages updating the component images once they are released. Mastodon has had some nasty 0 day bugs that involved account and server takeover that had to be fixed immediately, and you don’t want to lag very far behind in those cases.

That is probably true, however, I personally use it to share with others who are not part of my network, calendar integration, password database access across many devices, rsync backups across *many devices, document editing via Collabora and probably other things I’m not thinking about at the moment. I don’t have the performance issues that others note, but I took all of the performance improvement steps noted in the documentation: have bare metal well-resourced db hosts (for multiple services), dedicated redis cache, properly configured php-fpm, etc.

Nextcloud is good at general cloud features. It’s not specialized in photo management. If you’re storing memes or cell phone pictures it’s fine, but if you use an actual camera that uses a RAW format, you’re much better off using Immich.