Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It’s probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn’t apologize at all). Allegedly they’re trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it’s not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
If you have a spare machine lying around, install proxmox.
It’s a great way to learn VMs and networking.
Then you can create a VM, snapshot it (as a restore point), mess around with docker or podman, break stuff, then restore the VM to try again.
All this runs on your local network, so when it comes to setting up a Lemmy instance, you are going to want access to it from the internet. Things like Cloudflare and Tailscale can make this very easy.
It’s a wonderful rabbit hole of learning!
I would recommend /r/homelab or /r/selfhosted but I think those communities are still finding a home on the fediverse
+1 to Proxmox, it has been my lifeline when it comes to playing around with self hosting stuff! I’d heard about hypervisors before but was still under the impression that virtualizing had a ton of overhead (there is still some overhead, but not by much).
Additionally, Proxmox Backup Server is a really nice pairing as well!