It really depends on what you’re trying to do. At the end of the day, the foundational components are pretty standard across the board. All machines have a CPU, motherboard, storage mechanism, etc. Oftentimes those actual servers have a form factor better suited for rack mounting. They often have more powerful components.

But at the end of the day, the difference isn’t as striking as most people not aware of this stuff think.

I’d say considering this is your first experience, you should start with converting an old PC due to the lower price point, and then expand as needed. You’ll learn a lot and get a lot of experience from starting there.

This is not a “mistake”. This clearly proves they have Apple TV app integration implemented (just turned off). And someone accidentally turned it on.

But they have clearly put in effort and work into adding this functionality.

New functionality doesn’t just happen by mistake.

That’s attached to the instance? Do you have a screenshot maybe?

What is the error that you get?

Yes. It just will fill your feed with a bunch of things you might not care about. But admin vs non admin doesn’t matter in the context of what I said.

Your instance is the one that federates. However it starts with a user subscribing to that content. Your instance won’t federate normally without user interaction.

Normally the solution for the second part is relays. But that isn’t something Lemmy supports currently. This issue is very common with smaller instances. It isn’t as big of a deal with bigger instances since users are more likely to have subscribed to more communities that will automatically be federated to your instance. You could experiment with creating a user and subscribing to a bunch of communities so they get federated to your instance.