When I was young, I spent a lot of time playing Extreme Paintbrawl. I only learned years later that it had achieved notoriety as one of the worst video games of all time. Looking back it’s not hard to see why. But back when it was one of the very few games we had for PC, I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.
I was planning to sign up at BeeHaw because it seems pretty active and with high quality discussions. When I heard that it had defederated from Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world I decided not to sign up to any of those three as I would rather have access to all of them (though I can understand why BeeHaw defederated). So I just went with VLemmy.net as it was one of the recommended ones (on join-lemmy.org and the Awesome-Lemmy-Instances GitHub) and seems to be very broadly federated.
I don’t think it matters too much, though I think if you were signed up on the same instances as all your favourite communities it would be a bit more convenient.
Also using Hetzner, can’t complain and the pricing is good.
-site:pinterest.*
seems to work for me.
Services vary a lot on how they are deployed and their dependencies, etc. The knowledge I have (and honestly I don’t have much) I just built over time, tinkering with different set-ups and trying to debug problems when they arose. So I guess just choose a few difference services and try to get them working (choose low-stakes ones at first, where the risk of getting pwned or losing everything is very low). Docker can abstract away a lot, so maybe try more direct deployments if you are interested in learning.