Anyone here have experience self-hosting Stoat?

After a few evenings banging my head against the keyboard I finally have Revolt and Livekit self-hosted!

It's largely all working through the official stoat-for-web that I'm hosting, but something really simple is preventing me inviting my friends along to try it...

I've set the backend to invite-only and added an invite code to the database... But I can't for the life of me figure out how the devs intend for invites to actually work beyond the backend?

• It doesn't seem to be a feature of stoat-for-web at all.
• The app doesn't support any alternative servers as far as I can tell

Any good workarounds, besides opening up the floodgates...?

Self hosting Stoat is a nightmare at the moment.

Only the webUI works out of the box, if you want the phone app you need to compile it yourself.

At least the desktop app now supports connecting to custom instances, but it's by launch option, not the GUI.

All that said, my understanding was that you give the code to your friends, and they have to enter it during signup.

Enabling invite-only doesn't remove the signup functionality, it adds authentification, so only people with the invite code can pass.

I think I've figured it out somewhat.

Handling instance invite codes is definitely missing from the official stoatchat-for-web repo I built my frontend from - see:
https://github.com/stoatchat/for-web/issues/639

But I think what confuses things when you ask around for help is that AFAIK a lot of people are using various forks and pre-made docker images that patch things like this.

Only the webUI works out of the box, if you want the phone app you need to compile it yourself.

Damn, that's a nonstarter for anyone non-technical

It's non-starter for technical, too.

You have to ship client updates to all your users.