@jegpeek A Hello World is a common choice, Josh.
Welcome to Qoto. 🙂
@design_RG story checks out, given the company, though I guess that ship has sailed.
If you are starting from scratch, do not fall into the vanilla Mastodon fold; the progress on that is rather glacial, if I may say so.
A much nicer option is the Glitch-Social project, a fork off the vanilla people, who produce a much richer experience. I love it.
And there's Pleroma, which is more cutting edge yet, although less common. Light resource usage, very fast servers. Easier to install and maintain.
I wrote a Blog page that has some reasons why I consider those superior, as well as links to each project, manuals and references.
https://write.tedomum.net/rgx/muensterland-social-a-new-instance-joined