I’d like to contribute to the Lemmy community. I’ve been running my own private Linux servers for more than 25 years for things like email (years ago before all the spam), and as file servers, backup, etc. It’s an old, not very powerful computer, running Ubuntu server, in a corner in my house. Is it worth running a Lemmy instance on such a machine? I suppose there’d also be issues of how much data is going in and out, and how that would impact my internet cable usage. Thoughts?
Lemmy is very lightweight due to being written in Rust. I think you won’t have as much problems with the CPU as with the networking and bandwidth. It’s hard to host a reliable site from your home, usually requiring dynamic DNS, port forwarding, and very strong firewalling. The bandwidth usage is probably minimal if you decide to host images on separate servers like imgur, but still could be significant.
Maybe I’d limit the number of people to around five to see what the usage was like. It’s sounding like a fun weekend project now.
The problem with scale is going to be the database rather than the language / framework it’s written in.