This is even worse. Now you want the average user to know to now only know Ruby but also Docker? These are technologies for technical folks, the kind of troubleshooting required is not trivial.
And just packaging something in Docker does not make the need to understand it go away, what happens when things needs to be configured, when database connections don't work, when things go wrong? You still need to understand the software stack pretty well if you want to run it with any degree of confidence.
> This is even worse. Now you want the average user to know to now only know Ruby but also Docker?
Docker is not a requirement, it's an additional deployment option. Sure, having a static binary might be easier, but with Docker is pretty much equivalent, you get one, static download.
Had Mastodon been written in Go, this would not solve the problem of having to know Go if things go seriously wrong and you need to debug the actual software. Do you need C knowledge to run Linux? No, but it is certainly helpful.
For what it's worth, I've never had to touch anything Ruby-related in my several months of running a Mastodon instance.
And just packaging something in Docker does not make the need to understand it go away, what happens when things needs to be configured, when database connections don't work, when things go wrong? You still need to understand the software stack pretty well if you want to run it with any degree of confidence.