Self hosted instances - Lemmy.world

I am considering creating my own lemmy instance as my current instance (lemmy.world) is often down, and I enjoy this kind of a project. That being said I haven’t been able to find any resources on hw needed for this? If I have a raspberry pi 4b 8g with 128gb is that enough for just me using it? Do I need to pay for a cloud server to host it? How can federation work if I only have <10 users tops? Anything else I might need to know?

Hello! I did the same thing, and this is my first post on my instance!

I just put it on an old computer with 8GB of RAM, a HDD, and an old i5. Its running great so far.

One disapointment for me is viewing “all”. Since im the only one on my instance, the only communities I see are the ones im subscribed to. Let me know if you find a way around this please!

Can you elaborate on the issue with viewing all? If I just want to scroll and see stuff will I be bc able to see anything across the fediverse that I am federated with or is it really only stuff I am subbed to?
Servers only receive content from communities that at least one user on them is subbed to. Servers do not download the entire fediverse, only the bare minimum to cover what the users on it have asked for.
I’ve heard instances are using some sort of bot to “discover” communities
GitHub Link for one of those bots, which mentions in the README that there are similar bots here and here
GitHub - jheidecker/lemmony: A better "All" browsing experience for Lemmy instances

A better "All" browsing experience for Lemmy instances - GitHub - jheidecker/lemmony: A better "All" browsing experience for Lemmy instances

GitHub
Indeed. [email protected] is my community for, well, testing has 63 subscribers. One is me, the rest are bots that managed to find the community.
I was using this for getting content to my instance: github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
GitHub - lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot: Lemmy Subscriber Bot (LSB) for easy community federation :)

Lemmy Subscriber Bot (LSB) for easy community federation :) - lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot

GitHub
About the same hardware, works wonders (especially after migrating to 0.18.3).