In the What are YOU self-hosting? thread, there are a lot of people here who are self-hosting a huge number of applications, but there's not a lot of discussion of the platform these things run on.

What does your self-hosted infrastructure look like?

Here are some examples of more detailed questions, but I'm sure there are plenty more topics that would be interesting:

• What hardware do you run on? Or do you use a data center/cloud?
• Do you use containers or plain packages?
• Orchestration tools like K8s or Docker Swarm?
• How do you handle logs?
• How about updates?
• Do you have any monitoring tools you love?
• Etc.

I'm starting to put together the beginning of my own homelab, and I'll definitely be starting small but I'm interested to hear what other people have done with their setups.

I'm considering running my own Lemmy instance just for myself and maybe a few friends, but before I go to the trouble I want to make sure I don't get into a place where I've put the instance up but no one will federate with me because I'm too small to be worth it and they're overwhelmed by federation requests.

Those of you who've set up an instance, was this a problem? Do the big servers have explicit allowlists, or do they tend to blocklist instead?