MetroWind

And I have a playbook for installing Pixelfed on Arch Linux “bare metal” if anyone needs a it 🙃 https://github.com/MetroWind/service-management/blob/master/ssdnodes/pixelfed/setup.yaml

I’ve had some bad experience setting up Mastodon. Tried everything, docker, baremetal, OS package, local build… In the end I decided to use Pleroma. Infinitely simpler.

Lemmy is also pretty easy to setup if you don’t use Docker.

As to maintenance, my experience has been…I don’t have to. For small instances, things could generally run themselves indefinitely. I have a dozen servers running on my VPS, ranging from telegram bots to websites to things like Lemmy. Some of them receivs a fair amount of traffic. I pretty much never need to login to my VPS.

You can setup HTTP reverse proxy on your VPS. You’ll need to point the domain to your VPS for that to work.

What I really want is to be able to host multiple websites with my single home IP without those websites being obviously connected

That’s easy. You have two ways:

• Host the websites under different paths in the same domain. If your websites are static this is fine, but if they are “services” this may not be feasible (and could be very complicated if it is feasible).
• Host them under different sub-domains. The way it works is you create a bunch of NS records in your DNS, pointing the subdomains to your root domain, and setup one “virtual host” for each of them in your HTTP server. Both Apache and Nginx have the ability to match virtual host by domain name.

to avoid automatic bots constantly looking for vulnerabilities in my home network.

I’m not sure how you would eliminate bots by separating the websites though.