Keeping costs low while learning Mastodon

I want to take a tutorial on open source Mastodon to learn how to use it to set up my own social media platform app. I found a basic starter that began with the purchase of a linode hosting account, installs Cloudron and Mastodon to proceed. I don’t know if both are required, but that path was more expensive than a basic Digital Ocean free account (as a starting point). Searching the DO Marketplace, I found droplets for both Cloudron and Mastodon. At that point I became a bit confused. Are both required? In DO they seem to require two separate plans at $6/mo each. At this point I’m not ready to deploy an app. I’m just trying to learn. Does anybody have any tips or suggestions on how I should approach this? I began learning development some years back and opened a GoDaddy hosting account. After a few years, I quit GoDaddy and opened a Bluehost account. I’ve been learning on that for another three years now, and I’m transitioning from WordPress to React. I’m not an expert. I’m modest enough to admit that. I did open an Amazon AWS and I’m still paying a couple of bucks a month for a small learning app I have in an S3 bucket. They’re not really very helpful and their documentation is mind boggling. Although I’ve learned a lot, AWS is still daunting.

Please, some direction?