Lemmy for us was very broken, having many bugs. Kbin works a lot better, even though we had some issues with federation. Overall, the platform itself is quite nice and smaller communities are still fun!

I haven't had much time to setup my new server, which is a Dell Poweredge r720, but I will host plenty of stuff once I do get around to it! What I plan to host is pretty similar to what other people host.

Just use any VPN, Mullvad is nice.

You can also set up WireGuard on a random VPS you bought but like that's somewhat risky-ish.