The limitation of smaller platforms like Pixelfed is that basically no one uses them. If you are using Instagram to keep track of people in your local community you are unlikely to find anything else.

That is for containers not VMs

I’m thinking about doing BGP+Wireguard

You are getting confused by NAT

In IPv6 there is no NAT. NAT makes things more complicated and adds overhead that isn’t needed. In the old (pre Nat) internet IPs worked like it was suppose to and each device had its own routable address. IPv6 fixes this by both using a massive address space and allowing hosts to get infinite IPs. You can assign a IP address to each service since there is so much space.

In general NAT is the enemy of peer to peer networks which is what IP as a protocol is designed to do

I would look into learning about the OSI model

For context, Caddy is a reverse proxy which is specific to the layer 7 protocol http. Layer 7 protocols are generally not compatible with one another since under the hood SSH, HTTP are all very different despite them all running on top of TCP.

Do you not have internet access?

I personallly would just use a DNS challenge to get certificates

You just need a reverse proxy

I’m not a big Google fan but I will give credit where credit is due

They do put their money where their mouth is

They can use it bit it will take around 10 years or so

You can’t really install Linux

I would just get a old workstation

Wireguard doesn’t respond to port scans so it changes nothing

Putting it on a non standard port will change nothing

IP resolution requires ARP/NDP which are layer 2

To play devil’s advocate, technically don’t need a router for network. Your Proxmox hosts should be in the same layer 2 which means they can communicate regardless of the state of the default gateway.

OpenWRT has a zone based Firewall just like OPNsense does. Sure it isn’t as clean but I don’t really see a usecase for OPNsense that OpenWRT couldn’t fulfill

Do you need VXlan? Unless you are doing something really funky, regular vlans should work fine. VXlan is only really useful in very large environments where you want to have layer 2 traffic flow over layer 3 networks. I would strongly recommend that you just stick to regular vlans since they are simple to work with and all you need is a router somewhere on your network to terminate the connection.

I personally would not recommend this setup as any issue with your proxmox cluster will turn into a network issue.

Instead, I would purchase a cheapish router that can run OpenWRT. If you are dead set on OPNsense you can find x86 boards from various vendors or you can make a dedicated router out of a network card and a small form factor computer

That hasn’t been my experience especially with SSDs vs HDDS

SSDs have no moving parts so they will always use less power since there is no motor

Most small form factor machines will idle in less than 10 watts