Bit the bullet and got myself a VPS for a whole year. I knew installing a web service like Pleroma wasn't gonna be as easy as "click here and here and boom", but bohohohohoy did it turn out way more complicated than that.

My problem is that I've still got space on a shared hosting with an active domain name, and I wanted the VPS to broadcast Pleroma there. I didn't know beforehand that this and the VPS are two services separate from one another, but uh, yeah, they are.

This got kiiiiiiiiind of resolved after I've been told (by the customer support guy, not by anyone in the chats) that I could redirect VPS to the hosting domain by editing the DNS records, which... worked, I guess? Except instead of the usual "congrats, your website is live!" placeholder, I'm met with the 502 Bad Gateway error from nginx. Changing configs and finding solutions on the internet didn't help so far.

...yeah, I probably could've been doing things more productive than that.