I ran a server on a raspberry pi 3, paper was the only real option on that kind of hardware.

Thanks, I’ll start trying to set up pie fed as others suggested here, and see where that leads.

This is encouraging, I’ll probably go and do it. Thanks for the insight.

seriously speaking, how much work is to host an instance actually? Besides buying the domain and getting it up and running on some cloud/homelab? The are any security concerns or maintenance that would take a lot of my time? Do I need to put some effort in instance level moderation, or that comes from communities? How many resources/hardware an instance uses per user?