dudeami0

Haven’t talked to many billionaires then, they love how the government helps them.

It all depends on the size of your instance, but surprisingly little. The most expensive part of running an instance at the moment seems to be users interacting/posting. I’ve had my single user instance running for 22 days, here’s what I have found.

Hardware: I was running it on an HP Chromebox G1 i7-4600U just fine, I did move it to a HP DL360 G7 but this is overkill.

Network: I have 100Mbit/s down and 24Mbit/s up, I can’t even tell when lemmy is federating on my bandwidth charts. It seems to use very minimal network data. Hosting content or users will increase the data requirements, you’d have to get data from larger instances for a perspective there.

Disk: I’m using 4.7G for the postgres and 6.2G for the pictrs after having the instance online for 22 days. This will all depend on how active the communities you subscribe to are. My pictrs is only thumbnails sent during federation, and I have read these purge after some time but haven’t verified these claims.

TLDR; if you have some old hardware around stick a decent sized HDD or SSD in it and you’ll be able to host your own instance for personal use. If you have more users or host images on your instance, the requirements will go up so avoid this if network/disk space is scarce.

Priorities, right?

I would think it’s more about knowing how to trust it. See some news article about “This study said X”, don’t take it as fact. See a study that has been done numerous times by different groups that corroborate a result and you can have a much higher degree of trust in it. There is a reason the scientific method is a continuous circle, it requires a feedback loop of verifying results and reproducibility. The current issue is clickbait headlines getting the attention, people see it’s “Science” and blindly trust it and it becomes a religion like any other.

Being proudly ignorant of everything is bad. I will respect people who know they don’t know things though, you can’t know everything about everything. It’s why people generally specialize in a field in an industry.