Same! Hosting and properly managing Lemmy is far beyond my expertise, even without the added layer of onion hosting specifically

Running Lemmy it’s pretty easy. Setup some containers. Unless you plan to open registration but keep the instance only for yourself (like I do), there is really no more maintenance needed.

Probably you don’t even need a server in itself, a PC that stay turned on most of the day will work just fine, data exchange between federated instances will resume then your Lemmy is online

Maybe update the containers periodically and check that disk usage doesn’t grow too much, but that’s up to which and how many communities you subscribe to, since you are the only user of the instance.

With little system administration skills and a habit of getting ahead of myself, I’ve grown to fear containers more than the bare metal lol

But maybe I’ll get to it one day. Still, there’s no use for a single-user Lemmy server on another network if it can’t federate to anything else.

I forget but I think someone in the Linux sphere set up lemmy sites as a distinct unit for download on apt or kde or snap or something. Might be worth looking into.

Supposedly once you’re hosting sites it’s easy to set it up as a tor service in some setting or other, but I imagine federation afterward to be a bit of a challenge. It would have to fit the activitypub protocol or whatever it is and I’m not sure how to make that work over such a gap.