beehaw.org recently posted detailed June financials, and the bottom line is something like $600/month, including 1TB of bandwidth overage, for one of the largest public instances (they’re not responding atm or I would post the link). Before the reddit exodus, lemmy.ml was the largest instance, and it was running a couple thousand users on a $100/month VPS. Lemmy.world has posted itself running on a 32-core/64 thread 128GB RAM dedicated server at hetzner. blog.mastodon.world.
For an instance with only a few users, like friends & family, it should be pretty cheap.
Look for z-wave or zigbee plugs. You’ll need to buy a hub, but unless NZ has banned the protocol, it should get you smart switches, outlets, thermostats and more.
Lemmy isn’t distributed like that. Each instance does its own user and community management with local storage and processing. The community content - posts and comments - gets distributed to any other instance that asks for it, and that instance then presents it to its users. The result is that the content is replicated & distributed across many instances, and the load of presenting that content to users is shared.
So, running your own instance, where you’re the only user, will cause that instance to fetch whatever communities you’ve subscribed to via API. That probably reduces, slightly, the load on those servers, but it’s not going to be a huge effect.
Running your own instance and getting a dozen or a hundred friends to use it instead of lemmy.world or feddit.de, on the other hand…
It works for wikipedia, and that’s a big, monolithic organization. The distributed nature of Lemmy makes it more possible to run off donations, because individual instances are smaller and require less exotic hardware. They don’t have to store the entire corpus of Lemmy content, etc, etc. Smaller instances means less human resources and attendant management. I think most of these instances are still run by volunteers as passion projects.
I don’t think that will work as instances start getting to the million user mark. 10M… I’m interested to see 1) if Lemmy actually gets that big and 2) if users condense on one or a handful of super-instances or some other form of organization develops.
I can imagine, for example, Electronic Arts starting their own instance for arms-length game sites that might attract a large swath of people, or Nikon sponsoring an instance that specializes in photography and imaging-related communities.
2 spare drives and a safe deposit box ($10/yr). Swap the bank box once a month or so. My upstream bandwidth isn’t enough to make cloud saves practical, and if anything happens, retrieving the drive is faster than shipping a replacement, nevermind restoring from cloud.
Of course, my system is a few TB, not a few dozen.