darkfoe

I've found with running my own it's generally in the kilobits to keep up, except when subbing to new communities when it can spike up. Obviously more with more users, but it's not terrible. Hosting in a DO instance

I'm guessing a lot of them all at once requires all the various CDN caches to be refreshed, so higher load on the database(s)

Ahh there's a bridge nowadays hey? Yeah OP - this is likely your best way to go

In all honesty, there are a ton of us tech enthusiasts who have no problem paying 10-20$ per month to run an instance out of our own pockets. We get the ability to subscribe to content we used to use Reddit for, and we can have a few folks hop on with us. Multiply that by a bunch, and add in community funded instances, and we'll be fine.

Gotta consider server costs were only a fraction of Reddit's costs. Salaries are quite pricey, and we have lots of folks volunteering time which will make it all work.

I just run a searxng instance for myself. Fetches from multiple sources.

I've heard good things about kagi, but it does require paying for (though you can try out a free tier to see if it'll work for you)

There are some folks in the lemmy_support area lurking around offering help on the technical side, if that's what you're after! Many don't have time to dedicate to running a full instance themselves, but are happy to help with the setup

This is basically why I'm sticking around, besides being able to have a copy of the content I consume on servers I can do something about (ie, backup.)

Not expecting things to get better after IPO personally

I'm guessing no one living in Edmonton has bothered to start one yet is all

This is my droplet with 1GB of RAM only running lemmy:

free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:             964         386          68         141         509         219
Swap:           2047         310        1737

So expect at least 1GB for lemmy with postgres included when you include spikes etc.

Same. I know it's more work than caddy etc, but I've been doing it for eons now so it's muscle memory at this point.

The fact it's only so far a one season run makes me happy. Gives the writers time to actually have some fun with it - which is important since it has been so long.

Take a look at https://browse.feddit.de/

There's a auto-updating list showing even the popularity level - helps a ton finding them!

Current communities are popping up like crazy today and the previous couple days, so it's a bit to keep track of.