You'll be able to get an initial set of data from federation but you won't get any data beyond that.
Federation works via "pushes", but since your instance would be behind a VPN the other instances in the federation wouldn't be able to see it to push content updates.
Your best bet is probably Cloudflare tunnels, it's been suggested a few times in this community already.
Second best option is a cheap VPS, those can be obtained for $5/mo
Tailscale has funnels, you could check them to see if they can forward the traffic to your instance.
I don't know exactly how it'll work since the funnel has a specific URL provided by tailscale, so I don't know if a cname or something like that could work for a custom domain to your lemmy instance
You can use your own (sub)domains for Cloudflare tunnels if you use Cloudflare as your nameserver.
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