Ahh, that makes sense, well lucky you then haha
Lemmy.ml did a server migration which was posted about 8 hours ago which was pinned on lemmy.ml meta. It appears in the comments that some users have experienced a 502 error, which was related to “iCloud’s Private Relay”. They were able to bypass the issue using a VPN, although I haven't had any issues accessing lemmy.ml on my pc. I also read something about AWS us-east-1 being down, so it could also be related to that.
I believe there was a post by a Kbin hoster that they had to set up a specifc rule in Cloudflare to get around the issue. Although AFAIK I would assume that Cloudflare could definitely be causing some issues for some instances which may not be set up correctly to get around the issue, which in turn could lead to the issue your suggesting. But then again don't quote me on any of this I'm not a dev for any of the projects, and I'm basing this on my own projects where getting around Cloudflare to scrap data is a complete pain and sometimes more work then it's worth.
Just took a look at the stats on The-Federation.info and looks like Lemmy is doing just fine.
Lemmy Stats: 162 Nodes 90,053 Users 277,427 Posts 610,007 Comments
I use a BFO-9000 and I love it! Although its an ortholinear layout so if you went for it it'd probably take some time to get used to.
I rotate between a handful of public SearX/SearXNG instances. I used to use Duckduckgo but after learning about the deal they had with Microsoft I completely stopped trusting them.
As a "gamer" I've found that while gaming on Linux has become a lot easier over the years there is still a lot that needs to be worked on and while for some people it might be good enough, personally for now I'll still be dual booting.