And how would for example “mastodon.social” learn about my instance and show my toots to their users? Should someone from “mastodon.social” to search for me explicitly?

I use Manjaro ARM on my Orange PI because I couldn’t get Arch ARM to work on it, while Manjaro has support of my devices out of the box. Since I installed a minimal possible version (without any DE), it doesn’t feel bloated or something. It feels like I’m using Arch but with slower updates. Overall, it’s good and I don’t notice much difference from Arch. But anyway, I haven’t tried it for a desktop station.

I see. Thank you for such a detailed explanation :)

Hello, OP. I’m currently using Orange PI 3 LTS as my home server and this thing is even less commonly known and less supported than Raspberry. I have spent couple of days trying to make Arch ARM work on this board but at the end I gave up and installed Manjaro ARM which is basically Arch with some of stuff preinstalled (but not too much in the minimal edition). It was super easy to install and run, and now I happily use my Orange PI with Arch-based distro. Maybe you also can give it a try

That might fit my needs. Could you explain in more details please?

That was my mistake when I tried to host literally everything on an Orange PI which has only 2 GB of RAM