that's just because the USSR ruined them...
Germans still pay solidarity tax lil bro... USSR was one of the most talented entities in fucking up entire countries for decades to come, politburo was producing most vile, scheming and backstabbing ruling class ever to imagine. The very same people were running privatization and scraping all the social security programs in place, your boys from the West in Yeltsin's team were simply lacking and couldn't keep up.
I run flood together with qbittorrent, looks great everywhere.
yes, goes well together with Voyager. From app subdomain I route mobile clients to Voyager and desktop to Alexandrite, feels amazing.
database migrations will take a while for big instance, but other than that - smooth sailing.
communities
it's a band-aid, popular instances will be still under pressure to serve end users. Ok, they got the message through push from some other server instead of their user submitting it directly and the instance is not responsible for pushes to community subscribers (which is something, but not much, actually), however in the end it ends up stored locally and users still will be sending requests to popular instance to get their content if they are registered there.
users
not happening. It's a problem to change even username (and requires federation consensus first implementation-wise, it's not only lemmy around here), changing user's server will need fairly complex extension for id redirects or update propagation or something.
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/changeable-usernames/830
In general it's the same problem with migrating communities - you need to somehow update all the existing subscriptions across the federation.
I hope to be corrected on this, but this doesn't look too good.
I'm not shitting on lemmy and activitypub in general, it's a step in the right direction, however there are a lot of by-design issues which makes them prone to the very same problems as non-federated websites.
Lemmy is not truly distributed at this point, there are few well-known instances which are bearing the load and the rest is just sipping stuff through activitypub subscriptions.
If this thing will become even remotely popular with current architecture they have to follow the same path donations -> commercial or die. Serving a lot of users costs money, serving media content costs even more money. It's not a problem at the moment, but it will be.
ActivityPub is not a magic bullet, it's just a spec on how servers talk to each other. To truly involve each and every server in sharing the workload there's a need in something on top of that, or even better - replacing that since w/o active participation of client apps in load balancing it'll be the same reverse proxy shit in the end.
you need to set up port forwarding not only with your vpn provider, but also with gluetun:
https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/advanced/vpn-port-forwarding.md
there's a lot of different C's out there - I mean coding for microcontrollers looks really different to coding graphics with opengl, for example, especially for a beginner.
What do you want to do achieve with C specifically?
ramnode or linode will do, you'll need 2+GB of RAM.
C#
eh... those are fundamentally different, C is not object-oriented so OOD part goes straight out of the window. The only thing similar about them is syntax to some degree (which is really irrelevant), approach is completely different.
1000 daily visitors
it's not much, any non-micro vps from decent provider will do. For precise recommendations it'd be better to know where most of your users are located, latency is a bitch.
with arch it's relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that's it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there's nothing to break.
every time I've tried "out of the box" desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it's been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.