I presume this is in jest, but to be honest I feel like there is less risk of bad operators consuming my computing power and data when pirating than using legit services these days (ads, marketing, poor software etc...). I actually pirate content that I pay for as it gets all my content into a single location, and easily tracks what I have watched, and is better for taking it offline.

Are.you able to identify what dns provider youa re using, as I read the error as being related to the cert resolver not being able to access the correct zone from the DNS provider. I am using cloudflare and the Caddy file looks pretty similar to mine, so I aren't sure the issue is there.

One other thing to try is to restarts caddy, I found that sometimes reloading my caddy file wasn't enough, and thing seemed to stay working after I restarted the docker image

Yeah, I had lots of service configured like that, and you are correct that it is awesome, however I have other services on other hosts (not on docker swarm either) so I needed to delve into file config quite often, and doing some web dev work, I had services that weren't dockerized, so I ended up creating dummy services (socat containers) to make them easy. It just got a bit frustrating and taking too much headspace, I was able to setup caddy in about 2 hours one evening, so I am pretty happy so far, and I can see all my hosts in a single file which is great ( I ended up with orphaned routes etc.. from containers I forgot about when I was testing things).

As you say, different people come at the same problem and come away with totally different views ( which is pretty great that there are enough option that we can all find something that works for our needs ).

I am aware of it, haven't needed to use it, but seems pretty powerful.

True, but if someone spends 5 hours changing there proxy ( + 10 hours figuring out what you broke and fixing ), then they might save a few minutes down the line configuring new services. self-hosting maths....

Would I be correct to assume you are using Backblaze PC backup rather than B2?

As far as I understand, a server (in Lemmy) can allow federation or limit it to what the server admin allows. Effectively you can think of federation as a two was subscription. The "host" server of a community has the entire community posts etc... And then anyone that subscribes to a community from a other server gets the updates etc... From the "home" server.

So for a single community (in your example hosted on server A for example), server B, C and D can "federate" to that server for that community, and there is no concept of B and D federatingb for that community.

So Lemmy is kind of similar to an old school forum, but with some magic of having shared logins, so you can loging with an account on a other server, and subsequently get updates into your feed.

If a server admin has issues with users or communities from a other server I believe they can use the concept of white-listing (only connect to specific servers) or black-listing (block specific servers) to "de-federate".

I am not an expert by any means, but this is my understanding.

Check out the following link to get "more correct" information. lemmy federation

Although I might be interested in using the OP suggestion, I will draw the line at paying for this unholy combination :D ..... But we really, good efforts here

Yeah, this has me intrigued. May try it out in vscode just for a lark. Possibly actually will be easier to read with some nice shapes...

Does anyone have any idea what specs are required to run alemmy server, how about the "big" ones at the moment, just to get an idea of the scale of the challenge?

Awesome, thanks for the tip, wouldn't have guessed otherwise