Maybe look at figuring out how to host your own instance? I’ve got mine running on a 2 thread, 1gb ram server that’ll cost me less than 10 usd a month. So far it actually seems to run rather smoothly.
Then you get to choose who you federate with.
Did you use an Ansible role or docker? Is maintaining a manual federation list easy or a pain?
Also on a VPS with same specs. Used docker to set it up. The instructions feel like they are not fully fleshed out, especially as someone who never used docker, but it was enough to get it up and running.
Manually adding communities is a little bit tedious. Some overloaded instances make for difficulties. For the last few days it is impossible to subscribe to lemmy.world communities and even the ones I’ve previously subscribed to aren’t federating properly to my local instances. Also I’m unable to subscribe to any kbin magazine, but I don’t know if that is a whitelist or ratelimit issue on kbin.social side.
