I’ve heard a few people on here are starting their own personal instances so they can federate independently with different instances without relying on a larger, third-party instance. If I wanted to do this, would I need to own an actual server, separate from my PC?
If you want to make it the easy way, yes. If you can handle using Linux as your sole daily driver system (or can manage to configure a virtual machine to run on boot over Windows while opening all the required ports in both Windows and the VM): not necessarily