I’m a hobbyist who doesn’t have any s3-compatible storage. (That I know of, anyway.) What’s the easiest way to try it out?

Litestream author here. You can use the built-in file replication. It'll replicate all your database changes to another path on disk. I use it a lot for testing things out:

https://litestream.io/guides/file/

It also supports:

- webdav

- file

- SFTP basically ssh ( i have used tailscale and linux laptop ssh)

Use VersityGw, gives you S3 over the filesystem, no extra magic involved.

Easiest is probably a local S3-compatible like MinIO (docker) and point Litestream at that endpoint. If you want hosted, R2/B2 free tiers work too. It only needs S3 creds + endpoint.