I use Ubuntu server as well and for me it mainly was that I was already familiar with the Ubuntu way of doing things. :D And Ubuntu Server has a few more convenience features like kernel livepatching. And I think the software on Ubuntu LTS is a bit less outdated than that on Debian stable

I run Anonaddy on a oracle cloud server without issues. You’ll need some SMTP relay service like smtp2go or mailjet of course. But other than that it works fine.

Port 25 is only blocked outbound. Recieving mail works fine on oracle cloud free tier servers.

It’s probably best to still use a VPN or seedbox. But the chance that you get some nice mail is much lower because much more effort is required by the lawfirm. In order to get the IP addresses of people seeding the torrent they would first need an account and would get banned pretty quickly by not seeding or just snatching hundreds of torrents and not downloading them

If the Fediverse gets big enough search engines wil probably optimize for it e.g. prioritizing the instance of the community…

I just look at the local feed and then at the all feed. I don’t really see any issue with what’s the default

I think scaled Sort fixes most of those issues