Fediverse

Hi guys, I don't know if this is the right place to ask for advice about this so if I'm in the wrong place kindly show me where should I go.

With that out of the way here is my back story, I'm Iranian and as many of you guys heard in the news there are mass uprising, protests and geopolitical conflict going on here. So naturally our theocratic dictatorship leaders here decide on a whim when the whole country can have internet access to outside world or not and when they cut it off there is no safe place for people to keep in touch when we need it the most. Mostly they want to keep people in dark unaware of what's going on out there...

Here is what I thought, Can I deploy and run my own fediverse instance in this situation on VPS hosted inside the country? Me and a few of my trusted friends are the admins of a small local community of around 200 people give or take but this community can grow to 1000 roughly in future. I can be an example for my fellow countrymen here if I can others can too and many other local communities can be shaped like this inside the country... Which fediverse platform we should choose? Lemmy or piefed comes to my mind but I'm a total noob I have no background in programming. I can use LLMs for help Where should I start? Can you guys help me here. I'm a little lost all this is uncharted territory for me