a little more complicated than wordpress

Yes, but Wordpress is an aging blog platform and this is a new distributed social network, so that is to be expected.

Similar to ktorn, I'd recommend getting a VPS from Digital Ocean. Personally I always reimage them with Arch Linux, because it's the best Linux distro and always has an up to date version of Node. Having the latest version of Node is key for Scuttlebot because it is built on Node.

Then do a global install of Scuttlebot

% sudo npm install -g scuttlebot

Once you've done that, and it says that it has completed successfully, the next step is to run the server

% sbot server

You should probably do this in Tmux on your server because you need it to keep running while you are away. Detach from the tmux session and sbot will keep running in the background.

Next, you'll need to

sbot invite.accept <invitecode>

To connect your pub to another pub. Give us a shout and someone can create you an invite code.