I have a spare laptop running Linux Mint. I would like to try running my own instance and sharing it with a few users to help out and for the experience. Below are the specs. Do you think it will be powerful enough, and if so, how many users would it be able to handle? I could restrict uploading of media if that would make a considerable impact.
Dell Inspiron 15-5000 CPU: Intel Core i5-5200U, 2 cores, 4 threads RAM: 8GB Storage: SanDisk SSD Plus 1TB
A good frame of reference would be the VPS that lemmy.world is running on imo. Looks like they upgraded to a 4 core/16gb setup to handle the influx of users, so if your instance is running under 1k users, I believe those specs would be sufficient.
If it starts chugging, I wonder how well it’d work to run the server on the laptop and the DB on a VPS (or vice versa).