If you mean running the lemmy software on your own hardware to have your own instance, you don’t need programming skills for that. Self-hosting things is a related but different skillset. There’s a decent learning curve, though.
If you are familiar with self-hosting, you can probably set up a Lemmy instance pretty easily. If you are not, then running a publically federating service is probably not a good starting point. You should be able to search up a beginners guide to self-hosting, or take a look at [email protected]. I think hosting a personal wiki is a good starting point, since it is then a good place to write down everything you’ve learnt!
An iPad isn’t really a good server. You could use an old laptop or pay for a cheap VPS as a starting point. Many people start with a Raspberry Pi.
The Lemmy software seems to only store IPs for login tokens (i.e. on login).
It’s likely many instances store IPs short term in access logs as well.