Until the instance you choose to set up on ends up in a feud with any, or all of those instances.
The whole fediverse experiment is going to end up with a number of small, highly segregated communities, and even more political polarization. I guess if you want to live in an echo chamber, a federated environment is the best way to go about it.
And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.
He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.
If port forwarding is essential, then AirVPN is probably your best choice. I've been using them for years (including port forwarding) and I have no complaints.
The platform is fine and being able to subscribe across Lemmy instances is nice (i.e. I'm not even on Beehaw but here I am anyway) - it just needs more users and content.
The main issue is going to be getting that critical mass of users, especially on a platform that isn't quite as straightforward as a centralized one. Trying to explain how Lemmy works to my wife just left her confused and wondering what the point was. Getting people like her to make the jump to a federated platform is going to take time, effort, and - most importantly - content.
File storage, mainly. I have 2 NAS devices (one Synology I picked up in 2014, and an Unraid device I just built a couple months ago) - the former holds 13TB and the latter currently holds 35TB with plans to bring it to 100TB as I get money for more drives.
The Unraid system has a Youtube-dl instance running to auto-pull videos from the channels I follow, and I also run my Plex server from it. The Synology only has a Git server on it that I use to keep local copies of repos that I store on GitHub, along with personal projects that I'd rather not publish (even as private repos) in the cloud.
It works, at least. The only issue I'm seeing is that if I try to follow 'sublemmies' (or whatever the Lemmy equivalent for a subreddit is called) from certain other federated servers, they just sit in 'subscribe pending'. A fediverse that creates a lot of friction when spreading out beyond your local instance is a bit of a bummer.
I'm glad to see there's been more of a push for previously '48 hours only' subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.
And it's extra shitty because Beehaw has the largest technology community in the fediverse, so if you want to access it you better make sure you're a member of one of their 'blessed' federated friends.