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.
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.