Rather than flood #meta with tiny todos, I’ll log the initial setup here. I’m not going into a lot of detail, I’m waiting to discuss many decisions as a group.
New Discourse instances start in “bootstrap mode”:
To make launching your new site easier, you are in bootstrap mode. All new users will be granted trust level 1 and have daily email summary emails enabled. This will be automatically turned off when 50 users have joined.
I turn that off, because I don’t like everyone to opt-in.
Removed default logos. Instead we get a site name and a little house icon, which loads very fast. 
Before I invite folks over I’d like to have:
- Reply-by-email in place
- Uploads going to a bucket, served by a CDN
- A glance over at settings
I ran through the settings. Whoo, there are a lot, and one of my goals with a future talkgroup is to document them, because I haven’t found an adequate guide.
Anyhow, after I was done I remembered I should also edit Welcome to talkgroup to be a bit more, hmmm, accurate. 
Okay, set that up, and I believe it is working, but I’ll actually need users to test it…
Moving on to… uploads!
I think I got uploads working, but let’s test…
Ah cool, it worked! I had to set up some buckets in Linode and a pull zone in KeyCDN, and then used the directions at Using Object Storage for Uploads (S3 & Clones) - admins - Discourse Meta.
Okay… now that welcome message…
Okay, and the welcome message has been updated to the bare minimum required for me to invite folks over.