Think of it more like a push notification server than a messaging platform. You would need a service that sends push notifications to Gotify topics. I get the sense that under the covers it works a lot like MQTT where you have apps publishing messages to topics, and you have consumers (in my case, iGotify app on iOS) that pull those messages off the topic and present them to the user as push notifications.

Though… I think I need a better iOS client than iGotify. It’s not actually giving me any push notifications so it’s missing the whole point for me.

It’s got an open API so really there’s a lot more than my own use case.

I’m using it right now for getting notifications from flows in ActivePieces (I don’t want to get spammy with my site, which is the link in the original post, but there’s a how-to on getting that up and running also… ActivePieces is like a self-hosted Zapier)

I’m very comfortable in Docker and honestly most of the software out there in the Fediverse is weird. Like they make containerized deployments much more convoluted than they are supposed to be.

GoToSocial is maybe the least bad that I’ve tried so far. Most of the more popular ones are, IMO, really really bad on this front.

I’ve had their Stans counter this but then they point me to the process that they followed and it’s like something out of a Hogwart’s spell book compared to what most self hosted containerized apps are like.

I really wish it were more straightforward to deploy. It would be great to see many more instances popping up.

I have a few things going on. I’ve been blogging some of my notes on how I’m getting some things going in Docker. But I only relatively recently started sharing my notes so there’s not a ton yet. Hopefully there’s something useful for someone here. https://magnus919.com/tags/selfhosting/