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: @elena@aseachange.com.
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.
Do you have a credit card?
If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.
You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.
And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.
(And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)