I'm planning to self host - but just have one question, mostly a confirmation, as long as you're not hosting communities, you can comment and interact with others, without needing other instances to explicitly sync with your insurance, right?
I kind of want my own instance just to control what communities I sync for my own account, but not going to host any myself, so defederation of some instances doesn't affect me (unless I myself want to block them)
No. In both cases, they'd either have to manually block federation to your instance, or be operating on a whitelist-only federation basis.
Once you spin up your own instance and browse around a bit/subscribe to some communities, wait a bit, and then click on the "Instances" link at the bottom of the page and you'll see a bunch of instances that will have automatically federated.
I aim to self-host myself, one of these days. I'm having analysis paralysis picking a VPS tho, because I'll want to move my other online socials there too.
i really love the smaller communities, going to be so interesting to see how they all evolve and interact. Anyone that hasn't i really recommend going to the various other smaller instances just to look and get a feel for them, it's a great way to find interesting communities and you can subscribe from the instance you're on (assuming its federated).