If you're selfhosting already, you know how to deploy it. Are those services available in the internet via some domain? Having an SSL certificate with automated renewal is quite important. Make sure to update the machine the service runs on regular.

Backups! Having daily snapshots to be able to roll back if necessary is great. If you want to use your own hardware, I suggest Proxmox. If you want to rent a VPS, see if the cloud provider has something like that as well (will likely cost a little extra). Also, check the service's documentation on what data to back to in order to be able to restore on a new machine in case your server explodes. (3-2-1 rule). Shutting down the instance with no prior warning because of some error you can't recover from because of no working backup is the best way to spoil anyone's experience.

If you use docker, make sure to have it behind a reverse proxy and configure your docker ports to be bound to localhost only so you don't accidentally expose your database to the internet.

Think not only about technical deployment but also governance. Set instance rules and think how you want to do moderation. See if you have someone to help you with that.

Go for it! Set it up, fiddle around for a while and when you get comfortable, invite your friends. Just be upfront that there might be an occasional downtime for maintenance (which you will advertise a day before or so) every now and then.

I'm not really up to date on homelabbing hardware, but I'm surprised to see how much the whole thing is centered around raspis given how expensive they are for their relatively low capacities. Possibility of offgriding your homelab is an interesting project but not what I'd center this "revolution" around given most homelabs stay, well, home.

DIY 10" racks for second hand mini PCs would interest me way more but looking at the YouTuber's big lab racks affordability doesn't seem to be much of a factor.

I think the best thing of reddit is them having so many actually active niche subreddits. Many people saying Lemmy doesn't need to grow don't seem to care much about that which surprises me a bit.

Interesting approach, good luck! Admittedly I'm not sure if many users want to take their media uploading in their own hands and pay for it but maybe I'm wrong. Where are the images stored? Do you have your own hardware? Backups etc?

Also since you're interested in Fediverse media storage, I recently read about https://jortage.com/ It's a third party storage for your instance with deduplication, pretty interesting idea. Takes away a bit of the federated part though

The resources required by federating depend on how many people follow each other across those two instances and how much these post. Just existing and theoretically federating doesn't need any resources if there's nobody following, assuming threads isn't doing that different from everyone else.

For each post a user makes on your instance, it sends that post to each instance where someone follows the poster. There's no automatic sending to every known instance of every post on your instance.

I wish it had a self hostable sync feature

Every image on the federated timeline. It's a lot if users on your instance follow many other users.

Yes, it's possible. It requires some knowledge in server administration though, you can find the specifics at the Lemmy GitHub page.

Wheat is vegan, even if animals are harmed in the process of growing and harvesting it (pesticides, rodents in combine harvesters).

Venus fly traps are vegan, even if they harmed flies.

It think it's a fire and forget kind of app, so I wouldn't expect any updates besides occasional dependency updates.

There's also https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ Idk if they have a matrix room/space

Only thing that comes to my mind is MariaDB and "siblings", didn't know it's that common.