I mean to ask if there is actually compelling evidence of there ever being a man named Jesus in that region and time period who claimed to be god/son of god, or who people perceived as such, and where I could find it? For obvious reasons I am not considering the bible and derivatives as reliable. This is not meant to be a theological debate, I am merely looking at it from a practical and historical perspective.
Plenty! In fact, by the standards of people at the time, we have much better documentary evidence for Jesus than we have for a whole mess of other figures, up to and including Gisgo, best Carthaginian.
For obvious reasons I am not considering the bible and derivatives as reliable.
That's a mistake I advise you do not commit. To expand further, I commend to your attention the appropriate section of the FAQ.
Yes, though it is not great. The first thing we have to acknowledge is that ancient Roman imperialized Palestine is rather just poorly documented to begin with. Our only major surviving historian of the region is Josephus, and beyond that, we have to make do with archaeological artifacts, of which few to none still exist for the vast majority of people who lived there. As a result, we should not be expecting much to begin with, and the fact that there is a paucity of verifiable information about Jesus is not really indicative of much other than he was just like most every other Jewish person in the area.
The earliest surviving material are the Pauline epistles, of which he says a few things about Jesus. Jesus was born and raised Jewish (Gal. 4:4), and had twelve apostles, along with perhaps leaving a number of potential teachings which Paul cites throughout his letters. And then we have the contentious 1 Thess. 2:14-16 reference, though most critical scholars regard this as authentic today. As such, within around 15-20 years of his life, Paul references his existence.
After this we have the Gospels, but the attempts to reconstruct Jesus from them have been pretty sketchy. Many academics have become less and less interested in reconstructing his life and seeing the immense problems with attempting to do so. And so the Gospels are more and more being recognized as literary documents, whose historical accuracy has been challenged to the point that a few new academics have now regarded the entire quest for the historical Jesus (the attempts to reconstruct his life) to be fruitless (see Robyn Faith Walsh below).
The extrabiblical sources are not much better. As I noted in a comment below, most of them are very late. The Roman/Classical sources are accepted by almost all leading scholars to go back to Christian hearsay or similar. As a result, they present no independent evidence of his existence. Not that we should expect them to. Hearsay was considered a very valid form of evidence at the disposal of ancient historians and so we should not be surprised this was their source.
Josephus is the more challenging one. There firstly a reference to Jesus in the Testimonium Flavianum (Antiquities 18.63-64). However, this reference we know was, at the very least, tampered with immensely by Christians. It is, in fact, so heavily mutilated that several academics including the world-renowned E. P. Sanders regarded it as basically worthless. The "reconstructions" all depend on the particular author. Today, we have negative reconstructions where Josephus is perceived as polemicizing Jesus originally (Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Dave Allen), neutral reconstruction where Josephus was ambivalent toward Jesus (J. P. Meier), and positive reconstructions (Alice Whealey). We also have theories that the whole thing was authentic, while on the other hand a growing number of scholars see this entire reference as being a product of Christian forgery, there was no historical core. I count myself among these.
There is one more reference to Jesus in Josephus in Antiquities 20.200 which mentions "the brother of Jesus, who was called 'Christ', named James". This seems a rather clear reference to Jesus in the passage, but even this one has recently been challenged as to how authentic it is as well. Josephus is basically all up to debate.
Lastly, we have Mara bar Sarapion, but almost every scholar thinks this is later hearsay as well.
In short, we have no useful extrabiblical evidence for Jesus. But this is not surprising. The reality is, that between Paul and the Gospels we should have little reason to doubt Jesus existed, in my opinion, but I also don't think the question of his existence is even that historical to begin with. His existence is relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Sources:
E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 49–50
R. T. France, The Evidence For Jesus (Vancouver: Regent College, 2006), 21–23
Ivan Prchlík, “Auctor Nominis Eius Christus: Tacitus’ knowledge of the origins of Christianity,” Philologica 2 (2017): 95–110
Ken Olson, “Eusebius and the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61, no. 2 (1999): 305–22
Robert Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000)
Margaret H. Williams, Early Classical Authors on Jesus (London: T&T Clark, 2022)
Plenty of non-Christian sources. Following up on u/DanKensington:
And many, many more. Happy hunting.