I have a spare laptop running Linux Mint. I would like to try running my own instance and sharing it with a few users to help out and for the experience. Below are the specs. Do you think it will be powerful enough, and if so, how many users would it be able to handle? I could restrict uploading of media if that would make a considerable impact.
Dell Inspiron 15-5000 CPU: Intel Core i5-5200U, 2 cores, 4 threads RAM: 8GB Storage: SanDisk SSD Plus 1TB
I actually have an interest in doing this as well. One concern though. Wouldn’t standing up a Lemmy instance on you own network and federating potentially attract unwanted attention to your IP? Would it be better to host on a VPS instead?
You could get a second static IP address from your ISP to keep it isolated from your home network. That may require additional hardware.
So yeah, probably cheaper to use a cloud based solution. Unless you want the experience of setting that stuff up.
You can always do stuff like proxy through cloudflare. My instance is proxied.
What exactly do you mean with “potentially attract unwanted attention to your IP”? Any public IP attracts automated bot probing, regardless of what you host on it… and the rest is pretty much FUD by VPN snake-oil vendors.
If you really don’t want people to know your home ip, then you can use cloudflare’s proxying service for all you internet facing services.