I want to join the Fediverse. I don’t have a computer or anything to make something like a Lemmy instance, and I found that NodeBB will easily allow you to make a forum quickly, but I have to pay to do so. Should I just pay when I can or is there a free way to make a federated instance on a software?
It costs money to send electricity through wires.
Fair enough
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).
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)
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.
Why?
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
