Setting up and running your own Fediverse instance is an incredibly empowering thing. A good analogy for it is: imagine you have been renting apartments your whole life and then purchase a home. Your home, where you make all the rules, customize it to your liking and take great care of it because it’s YOUR home. That’s precisely what I have been doing for a digital home - on the Fediverse - with my GoToSocial microblogging instance: @[email protected].
If the thought of self-hosting makes you immediately tune out, thinking: “oh my, this sounds so complicated and unattainable for a regular, non-technical person” well, I can understand. I had that exact mindset as recently as November 2024. Heck, even December 2024. But then I took the plunge and never looked back. I’m here to tell you about my journey of tech empowerment, made possible by YunoHost and GoToSocial.
Yeah if you aren’t down to publicly expose your IP address / port forward, the cheapest way I can think of still involves a several $/mo VPS that just reverse proxies home to a more powerful PC. That’s what I do since I’m behind CGNAT.
I hosted it on a 1€/month vps at ionos. An instance with multiple users actually, and it runs just great. Not a lot of space but hey, that’s 12€ per year
Wow that’s impressive! I tend to be very value oriented, and at the sub $5 price, you’re getting so little that I feel like you’re mostly paying for a public IP and bandwidth. And of course selfhosting your compute is usually a win, especially if you already have something laying around. So I just pay the public IP tax for a reverse proxy and home host it all. I would probably go with a cheaper VPS for my reverse proxy but I need the confidence it’ll hold up to multiple friends Plex streaming.