Yes! Mostly having a plan on how to make your service reachable in the internet while keeping the rest of your local stuff shutdown.

Many people recommend cloudflare, but I don’t think it’s necessary. If you get a public IP from your ISP, it’s relatively easy with dyndns. Personally, I have a virtual machine running nginx as a reverse proxy and configured the router to forward port 80 and 443 to that machine.

You got quite good answers already, here and in the other thread.

My suggestion is to not start with pixelfed but something else (simple stuff like dokuwiki, you can use it to document your stuff while you’re at it) to get an understanding of the whole process (running the service itself, making it available to the internet after hardening your infrastructure a bit etc).

Also, if you’re not settled for how to do it exactly, give Docker a try. There’s a reason it’s popular among selfhosters!