Stupid question, but are there free VPS/VM instances for a jobless girl who wants to run her own instance?

https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/selfhosted/p/650864/stupid-question-but-are-there-free-vps-vm-instances-for-a-jobless-girl-who-wants-t

Stupid question, but are there free VPS/VM instances for a jobless girl who wants to run her own instance?

I have no job, so the gift cards I have are prepaid and only have a few dollars on them. I should get a job soon, but in the meantime, I want to ru…

Oracle Cloud isn’t available in my location by the way, and I tried Google Cloud, it keeps crashing when I do an instance and it wants me to pay all of a sudden.
I wouldn’t start with anything involving user-generated content… Otherwise, it could easily be misused, and the police might end up at YOUR door.
Thanks

I might

1) Get new equipment and always run my old computer

2) Get a Raspberry Pi

3) Keep running my new computer forever

That’s not the point. For example, I use Raspberries as an ad blocker, file server, Nextcloud, private (!!!) web server, and VPN.

I wouldn’t run ANYTHING on them that’s publicly accessible…

Imagine if two users used it to share child pornography, for example… Then your life is completely screwed as the middleman…

Or malware gets distributed through it… Or your entire network gets hacked…

Quickly dismiss the idea of setting up something like Lemmy or whatever on your own network. The world is a shitty place… which means it’s not a question of if something will happen, but WHEN

Ahhhhh, I get it now. Thanks :) In the meantime, I will just run communities on other instances, like my Scandinavian Left-Wing politics community on the PieFed instance I use!

Pi is a good option because of it’s low power draw.

However I find used mini pc’s and Small Form Factor desktops to be a better value and their idle power is similar to the latest Pi (while costing about the same as a new Pi).