Awesome, thanks!

If you click on the link:

Use case: I run a single user instance where I don’t create any of my own communities but I subscribe to and interact with a variety of communities on other instances. By making my instance non-private, everyone on the Internet can browse to it and see every remote community I’ve looked at which seems pretty bad for privacy.

Why move from Reddit to a forum?

Sadly, I don’t see the answer to this question. While reddit shares some features with classic forums, these platforms are different. Moving to XenForo, which also requires a quite expensive license, is not the best choice as a reddit replacement.

You’d probably need to configure your router if you want to access your laptop when you’re outside of your home network (e.g. from a mobile phone). If there’s an incoming connection to port 443 (https), your router doesn’t even know which device in the network could handle it. Port forwarding should be easy to set up on any modern router using their web interface. Same applies to some VPS providers like AWS Lightsail, they might have firewalls.

Like with every big task, take it step by step. You can’t learn everything overnight, start with something small. Set up a web server (e.g. nginx) what will act as a reverse proxy. Make it accessible from the internet. Then try to set up one of the services from your list and focus on it.

Learn one thing at a time, don’t rush and avoid context switching.

It’s extremely easy to do if both the server and client are using wireguard. Just add FwMark = 42 to both interfaces (the exact numeric value doesn’t matter). This way, internet requests will go through the paid VPN provider and local requests will be working too.

If not, good luck with iptables.

One database for many different services could pose a security risk, though it should be extremely low if each service can access only its own database. However, it’d be harder to distribute services across different hosts if you ever decided to do that. Also, different services could require or work better with different database types. I prefer to use separate database containers.