I'm posting this from kbin, so I don't know if you will see this, but I thought Magazine was a group set up by kbin (like a sub-reddit, with a specific name). Are you saying that a kbin Magazine is something I set up myself with my own collection of content?

I'm thinking about self-hosting an instance, but I'm not clear if these bigger instances would block me because I'm some little unknown server. Would they have to manually give me access to interact (federate?) with them if I self-host? Or would I automatically be able to post on their server?

Is it difficult to find a small instance that has access to the larger instances? Are you able to post to both Beehaw and lemmy.world from the server you mention?

I'm thinking about self-hosting an instance, but I'm not clear if these bigger instances would block me because I'm some little unknown server. Would they have to manually give me access to interact (federate?) with them if I self-host?