Wow this is cool. Do you use OpenWrt at all? It would be amazing to integrate with its DYNDns package.

If you know nothing about hosting your own instance why not start learning? Try something slike running Yunohost.org on a VPS and start running Friendica, GotoSocia, Takahe or even ActivityPub on a Wordpress website to get some experience.

If you aren’t technical then you shouldn’t try to make technical arguments but get your academic team to talk to your IT team about the reasons why you want an ActivityPub solution and let them figure out the technical questions.

So an update on this. I have started looking at yunohost.org because it standardises the installation and maintenance of a variety of common apps - HomeAssistant, LDAP, email server, mqtt, Nextcloud. i recently saw a post on Reddit about succession planning which reminded me about my own questions.

Id much prefer people just posted on Lemmy.

Im just new with yunohost.org but it does seem to make installing applications very simple. Users, email, reverse proxy.