Big city mandatory valet comes to my mind.

Sorry, but your questions are difficult to understand. Could you please clarify what you are researching? The fediverse isn’t some metaphysical thing.

What is your curiosity?

My lemmy.fan instance died. Something broke with federation and I’ve never been able to get it running again, even with a new database and a new subdomain. I gave up for now, at least until better error checking and recovery is implemented.

I’ve been using a pihole exclusively for years on my Ubiquiti network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it’s a stable, easy ad-blocking solution. I’ve never even considered moving from it, seeing how well pihole Just Works.

I like to tinker with software and thought a standing up an instance just for myself. Then you can keep your account, domain, communities, etc relatively static.

I think having various instances geographically distributed is also beneficial so popular instances can be offloaded a bit.