@CraigCabbage I think you reprent alot of people. My vision is that eventually an #opensource based #router - #server with the features of #openwrt and #yunohost and a clear simple guided sertup would enable drop in personal / fanily email, file serving, personal finance, social media and network sharing solutions.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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It costs money to send electricity through wires.
Fair enough
The question isnt easy to answer as you dont need an instance to participate. It is far better if you join an instance and spare yourself the hassle of admin and/or mod work. If you absoluteky want to have a community which you can build and mod, you can do that on any instance. If you think you can provide something that nobody else can then you could open an instance. But in that case i suggest finding people to do this with because it is a large project.
And only after all those considerations, you should think of the tech aspect. You can get a vps for 10 bucks a month and host lemmy on it, probably amongst other things. But i would probably not do it if youre not really curious about server hosting stuff. Managed hosting (which is the offer you mentioned) is another idea but it isnt worth it imo. Rarely will someone really have the need to use that and then the company provoding needs to make money so you will lose.
Thank you 🙏
You'd have a hard time finding a company that would just give you access to a vps or managed instance for free. Running a server always costs someone money.
oracle free tier
Oracle free tier is honestly not worth the hassle. Their portal is absolutely confusing, and those who figure it out will just get banned.
There are free tiers for some cloud providers, like Oracle (though personally I recommend against using anything Oracle ever).
I use Oracle fo No Lastname Needed, and it works well (although I have out grown the free tier), but I would NOT recommend them for a newbie to hosting as it's a very complex eco-system compared to just a cheap VPS
- Oracle is evil
- Google is evil
- AWS is evil...
Yunohost is pretty easy all things considered.
Most of my services are on the equivalent of a raspberry pi. But it's not really for scale, just for fun.
The software is free, but hardware is not. You could buy an old laptop or even something really cheap, like an Orange Pi Zero.
Best way to run an instance for cheap is on your own hardware, but I would only do that if you are experienced with self hosting since it would require port forwarding (unsecure if done wrong)
@CraigCabbage maybe you have an old computer to run it ?
Nah, but I could ask my Dad. He did last time i checked
@CraigCabbage if you have maybe a 10years old computer you can install Linux through the bios to run mastodon or any fediverse software. you can also pick a sub domain name to have a free domain name. once you got both, you may need an extra storage but basically you will be able to own an instance for free
Thank you!! Dad has one but you can't access the web with it.
@CraigCabbage why can’t you? no wifi and no ethernet? how old the computer is ?
IDK, Dad and Grandpa say the computer is too old to access it and he thinks me buying an ethernet cable is useless 😭 The computer is probably 10-13 years old, I’m not sure
@CraigCabbage should be compatible with internet, or if you want you can also buy some old stuff through eBay, its also cheap
Is there any way to federate a ProBoards forum? I made one once and someone said I should federate it
Thanks so much!!
Yes, yunohost plus oracle free vps, like you 100% could do it for free even just hopping trial to trial moving your yunohost backups vps to vps lol
or yunohost plus any other free vps, just look it up, idr where else has one, some places have credits if you signup with codes or off certain links like hetzner has free credits, vultr, and some others too, lowendtalk also has hella cheap vps under 10$ amonth that can support lemmy + more apps easily, the issue is space fills up fastish after a few months, and I think by default in the yunohost version theres a pictrs error that makes photo uploads crop weird you have to fix. (if you upload photos through it)
free domains available elsewhere or 1$ a year
Why?
Oracle has a generous free server offering. You will need to trust Oracle not to turn off your server because a business customer needs it, though. Availability of their good free tier also fluctuates and you need to figure out their weird IP/firewall/security config.
You need a domain name to effectively federate, too. There are free options available for those too, but they're not very reliable.