Might look into Gotosocial considering it’s more lightweight.

Other than that I wonder whether it’s better for the uni/department to register on another instance, similar to how fosstodon is home for many FOSS projects. An inter-unis, academic-focused Fediverse server might be a good club project, and could allow more donation sources to sustain too (although this is pretty above-scope from what you’re asking).

Tailscale/Headscale + DERP may work as they relay packets through a typical HTTP server. Just make sure your router has some space to download the binary - for MIPS they’re like ~60MB or something iirc.

My bad, I meant the recommended deployment is to bring your own auth provider, but normal username/password is fine too. Glad it works!

Assuming you just want file sync and storage, if you can live without External Storage (having another SFTP/WebDAV/whatever backend), then I think oCIS is great for you. It also expect an OIDC auth provider by default - this guide helped me through. Note that you have to configure the S3 storage driver in oCIS and properly backup your buckets and metadata.

For Talk you can setup an internal Matrix and TURN server too. I recommend conduwuit if you want something lightweight, or Synapse (quite heavy) if you need OIDC integration.

An alternative method is to run an actions workflow that syncs from upstream images directly, like what Forgejo actually do.

https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/oci-mirror

FYI there is an upcoming storage driver that can solve this issue