Sure yes of course thats another way to do it. As always, if you do it yourself it will be cheaper.

Were they not invested in target retirement funds? If you do it right your portfolio shouldnt do that.

I just wish the Dev would come up with a way to allow me to buy it without the play store.

When you host your own Lemmy instance that means every server ypu federate with is going to copy its dataz including images to your server. That means that if you federate with someone who is poorly moderated, you can end up hosting CSAM yourself. You need to be prepared to deal with that problem.

I did it for awhile but didn’t want to deal with the CSAM. Shut it down after a few weeks.

I use OpenWRT on my network and each server I have is on its own VLAN. So in my case, my router is the firewall to my servers. But I do have on my todo list to get the local firewalls working as well. As others have said, security is about layers. You want an attacker to have to jump multiple hurdles.