I think my grafana is newer and stuff is deprecated
that's unlikely, i'm running 11.2.4 currently.
yes, you'll need to run that exporter against each instance you want to be monitoring.
my setup looks more or less like this: https://github.com/Nothing4You/grafana.lem.rocks
depending on the grafana version you are using you may be running into this bug though: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/96356
on lemmy, people blocking you will only hide your content from them, it won't prevent you from seeing theirs.