My lemmy.fan instance died. Something broke with federation and I’ve never been able to get it running again, even with a new database and a new subdomain. I gave up for now, at least until better error checking and recovery is implemented.
I’ve been using a pihole exclusively for years on my Ubiquiti network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it’s a stable, easy ad-blocking solution. I’ve never even considered moving from it, seeing how well pihole Just Works.
I like to tinker with software and thought a standing up an instance just for myself. Then you can keep your account, domain, communities, etc relatively static.
I think having various instances geographically distributed is also beneficial so popular instances can be offloaded a bit.
Sorry, but your questions are difficult to understand. Could you please clarify what you are researching? The fediverse isn’t some metaphysical thing.
What is your curiosity?