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Thank you for clarifying(and sorry for the late answer).
For you (and anyone interested) I will answer the questions you asked.
Are you going to close upon any legal threat, or only upon a certain degree or size of threat?
If the legal threat is real(they have a real chance to win in a court) and there is nothing I could do(come to an agreement, move the hosting to another server etc), then I would close the server.
From the US only, or from any country?
Server is hosted in Germany
Will you close instantly, or will you guarantee a Minimum Survivability Timeframe for eg.: helping users to migrate away, like Mastodon’s covenant does?
As long as there aren’t fines for keeping the website up or I get arrested, I would give a notice, so users can move to another server.
Lemmy.world does a great job(with a little downtime) and it is the same software we are hosting, so I can only see a couple of ways to make a better “offering”
I try to provide a better uptime and a different deferation/moderation policy. I don’t have the skills to make visual customizations, but I have added multiple frontends(like lemmy.world).
I’m open to suggestions/ideas if there is anything else that could be done to improve the “offering”.
As an alternative to lemmy.world I would like to suggest my own instance endlesstalk.org.
I have no plans to deferate or ban anything releated to piracy. Only thing that might change my mind would probably be a company taking legal action against me.
I also strive to have as little downtime as possible and keep everything running smoothly.
Anyone is welcome to join my instance at endlesstalk.org. Its running on a pretty beefy server, so it can take a decent amount of users.
There are multiple frontends like lemmy.world and I have setup a seeder(lemmony), so the all feed should be pretty filled.
How powerful should my hardware be?
I think 512mb ram is probably a bit too low. There is a risk for the pc to crash at some point. I think 1 GB+ should be fine.
Which ports do I need opened to operate a lemmy instance for my personal use (i’m only going to be connecting from home)?
To avoid opening ports you can use Cloudflare tunnel as you mentioned.
Only other option is probably renting a cheap vps. Here is a cheap vps options for 2.5$
If you have the ability then self hosting is the best option
Otherwise I think instances with less users and content will be quicker, but then the all feed will probably be smaller.
I will also recommend my own instance endlesstalk.org. It is very small(10 users) and the server is located in Germany. Hopefully that is close to where you live, so the latency is low.
I’ll recommend my own instance at endlesstalk.org. There you can create a community, if you want. lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works might also allow creating of new communities, but I haven’t checked.
Usually, it is correct, that the all feed would be smaller on a small instance, but “seeders”, like lcs or lemmony can make the feed in all tab much larger.
It does this by subscribing to a lot communites. Lcs does for specific communities and lemmony subscribes to everything. You can see an example of an all tab with many subscriptions(added via lemmony) at my instance
I think the easist way to check, if an instance uses one of these seeders is to check the number of subscriptions in the instance. Or just ask the admin for the instance.
For container orchestration, which is mostly what k8s provides, then you could use docker swarm or nomad. You could use docker-compose with multiple replicas of the wanted container + a load balancer to divide the load.
In general I don’t think k8s/k3s is needed for hosting lemmy yet, but since I have a setup for k3s, it is easier for me to use it.
Depends on the weather outside and the insulation in my apartment, since I don’t turn the heater on.
Probably around 10-15 C