On a technical level, user count matters less than the user count and comment count of the instances you subscribe to. Too many subscriptions can overwhelm smaller instances and saturate a network from the perspective of Packets Per Second and your ISPs routing capacity - not to mention your router. Additionally, most ISPs block traffic traffic going to your house on Port 80 - so you'd likely need to put it behind a cloudflare tunnel for anything resembling reliability. Your ISP may be different and it's always worth asking what restrictions they have on self-hosted services (non-business use-cases specifically). Otherwise going with your ISP's business plan is likely a must. Outside of that, yes, you'll need a beefy router or switch (or multiple) to handle the constant packets coming into your network.

Then there's a security aspect. What happens if you're site is breached in a way that an attacker gains remote execution? Did you make sure to isolate this network from the rest of your devices? If not, you're in for a world of hurt.

These are all issues that are mitigated and easier to navigate on a VPS or cloud provider.

As for the non-technical issues:

There's also the problem of moderation. What I mean by that is that, as a server owner you WILL end up needing to quarantine, report, and submit illegal images to the authorities. Even if you use a whitelist of only the most respectable instances. It might not happen soon, but it's only a matter of time before your instance happens to be subscribed to a popular external community while it gets a nasty attack. Leaving you to deal with a stressful cleanup.

When you run this on a homelab on consumer hardware, it's easier for certain government entities to claim that you were not performing your due diligence and may even be complicit in the content's proliferation. Now, of course, proving such a thing is always the crux, but in my view I'd rather have my site running on things that look as official as possible. The closer it resembles what an actual business might do, the better I think I'd fare under a more targeted attack - from a legal/compliance standpoint.

Your biggest fear should be something like the CSAM attack from a few months ago. I doubt you have tens of thousands to spend on a lawyer.

That's why I killed my instance.

I run my own Pixelfed and Lemmy instances on not so young consumer grade hardware and it's fine, but I am the only user. I would not want to have to deal with other users' complaints, bad behavior, or other BS.

You may want to also look at offloading media with pict-rs to a object storage like an S3 API compliant bucket. Otherwise, you'll find Lemmy soaks up lots of storage.

I'm doing what you want to do now. I'm running lemmy.fan on a NAS with really good hardware on a fiber connection. My ISP provides symmetric bandwidth and doesn't block anything, though emails can't be sent with a local smtp server since most places don't trust the IP addresses of residential subscribers.

I learned a ton, I'm enjoying running things, and though it's an open instance I don't advertise it. I say go for it. Experiment and have fun. If it sucks and you hate it you just stop the containers.

But my biggest fear is overloading my network. I already don't get the fastest signal in some parts of my house, and I am worried the extra traffic might put more pressure on the network.

This line concerns me. How experienced are you with servers and networking? Your WiFi network should be fine unless you have your server on WiFi - which you absolutely should not. Ethernet only.

If you set this up limit it to just yourself and friends to start. Get a feel for it before exposing it to strangers.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #337 for this sub, first seen 5th Dec 2023, 02:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Could be a target of intentional or unintentional DDOS.

I'm fairly sure the obligation to report goes back as far as the DMCA at least. That law gave carriers and hosting providers certain limited liability against user generated content provided they had reasonable moderation policies and acted promptly to take down content either subject to copyright complaints or other legal demands. Basically a you're ok as a host if somebody does something bad, just so long as you clean up the mess as soon as you become aware.