The boring answer is: It depends.

Is all about the traffic and number of users which is dynamic and not same for everyone.

If it’s only for yourself then you could host an instance on a raspberry pie for sure.

If you’re looking to create a big instance with many users you’ll need a lot of power and storage.

It’s almost impossible to put the requirements down on paper. Sure you could estimate with enough data.

I would love to hear the answer to this as well. I guess it’s heavily dependent on how many users you have and if they are uploading images or just text, or just lurking.

I think if you did not allow signups it would probably be extremely minimal.

Honestly, I’m interested in knowing some of this too.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration.html says about 150GB RAM and negligible CPU usage.

I assume an instance with users subscribed to active communities requires meaningful storage, but I’m not clear the sizes we’re talking about (what’s data growth per/day been like for some of the larger communities).

EDIT: Likewise, I’d love to know if that 150GB RAM is fixed or whether that number grows with use.

I suspect that it depends on if you’re accepting other users and or communities. If so, you’ll have to be global mod and probably spend time sorting out mod reports etc.

If you’re just setting up an instance for yourself, it’s probably easier but you’ll need an account somewhere else to discover communities and index them back to your instance.

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