why not? it’s not like there is any competition.
Microsoft is making more money off Linux with Azure than several red hats combined.

Turns out many middle eastern toilets can’t handle toilet paper.

It’s more about toilet paper than plumbing. Toilet paper has to easily dissolve in water, otherwise you can clog any toilet, be it western or eastern.

10% is too low. Usually they won’t be against paying you the same they are paying your current employer for your services, so you can safely do 20% raise ( your employer charges more, of course, but there are other costs involved to set up and run the operation).

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.

I’ve updated to 0.18.0 as well and can see your comment

It’s not even about gui.
If you want to self host you get yourself a pile of software of community-level quality (i.e “it works good until it doesn’t” is the best outcome) you need to care about. This means constantly being involved - updating, maintaining, learning something, etc, and honestly it’s time-consuming even for experienced sysadmins.

it’s most likely coming from postgres, db server tends to be the main resource hog.

Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

almost. It’s actually worse than that - when you subscribe to a community from your server it will fetch like 20 posts and that’s it, you’ll get only new stuff after that, so there’s no possibility to do a full mirror of selfhosted, for example, if you started your instance today and didn’t fetch posts and comments manually.

ActivityPub per se is just a spec on s2s/s2c communication, which is not a great thing since in many cases it assumes single source of truth, which potentially puts huge load on more popular instances.

I think a quick and dirty hack to this could be the following - each linked instance may maintain cache of announces (so there would be benefit of just forwarding original http signed requests w/o being afraid of malicious actor), which your instance could pull, this way you could populate your mirror without overloading the original source.
Distributed activities propagation though… Let’s say there are some design steps involved to make this truly distributed, however I feel like it’s possible.