My personal instance is 2 vcpu 1gb ram and 30gb storage. It’s just me using it, but it’s running rather decently, so maybe if it’s just a few people you could get away with something like that

And I get that, but I feel like there might be better options than an old boys club that requires endorsement to get in. For instance, maybe levels of trust? a newly federated instance gets rate limited or something, so that it can’t suddenly start spamming 1000s of posts or whatever

I’ve only recently setup my own lemmy instance, to test new stuff, fix a few things, whatever. Something like this would prevent me from federating with the content I want to see, and I’d have to go try and be buddies with a trusted instance admin to get endorsed?

I think this may be something we want to discuss more as a community, and see what better solutions might be out there