Selfhosted twitter alternative, not mastodon if possible

Hello, I have seted up my lemmy server couple months back and am loving it. One problem I have with it is that I can't follow individual users so I have been thinking about selfhosting another fediverse service that will satiate my need to follow specific users.

Most popular platform on the world generally for that is twitter so I wan't to see if there is any good twitter alternative. I know of mastodon but have heard that it can be hard to selfhost and uses a lot of storage ( that wouldn't be that much of a problem with s3 storage provider, like what I do with lemmy already ).

So I would like to know if there is any simpler "twitter" alternatives for following single user's on the fediverse, preferably with s3 storage support.

If mastodon is the best in that regard I most likelly will just selfhost it.