Veraticus

I do infrastructure stuff professionally and wanted to not manage that at home so just went for a Synology.

Just depends on how DIY you wanna go. I’ve had my Synology for years and it’s needed zero ongoing maintenance and has never had any problems so I’m pretty satisfied with it.

My opinions:

1. No, there is no advantage to Windows server; yes, you are wasting your time. Most good server stuff out there is Linux-first or Linux-only.
2. Yes. bind is the gold standard of DNS servers but can be kind of annoying and fiddly to configure. dnsmasq or coredns are excellent alternatives.

Maybe but it doesn’t seem like a terribly good idea. All prior art for Lemmy, and most serious server stuff on the Internet, is on Linux. It would be a lot of effort and would result in a worse solution than the tools that already exist.

Hello from lib.lgbt!

I use Hover… it’s weird no one else does. Should I be moving off?

You’re probably looking for Tailscale. Simple to use, free plan, extensible and powerful.