Probably any of the ThinkPads I had. They were sturdy and just ran everything I put on them. Second place would be the Dell XPS 13, I like it because it is very small and light, but in the one I have now they already had to replace the motherboard after a month and when holding it with one hand it bends and sometimes does a click on the trackpad, but I don’t want to send it in a second time because I normally don’t use it like that.
Yeah, both with Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy I started on my own instances. Actually not quite, I had an Mastadon account for a day somewhere before I decided that I want to use it for real and installed my own instance.