You’ll be able to get an initial set of data from federation but you won’t get any data beyond that.
Federation works via “pushes”, but since your instance would be behind a VPN the other instances in the federation wouldn’t be able to see it to push content updates.
Also, @hyper@lemmy.ml, what does your nginx.conf look like? Now that the webpage is loading, the backend might be blocked/not configured properly in nginx, so nginx isn’t properly forwarding requests to the backend.
Cloudflare? Namecheap?
Not sure exactly what features you’re after but the vast majority of them support what you mentioned above.