What exactly is the cost of self hosting a Lemmy instance? Understandably you would want a powerful server, but that would be just a single one time purchase.
Where does the rest of the cost come in? Does it require more than a 2 gigabit connection and thus require a data centers 10 gigabit connection?
If I could run an instance on 2 gigabits and spending a 1-3 thousand on a server then I’d be interested in giving it a try.
Depends how many people you are hosting for. But what you describe seems overkill, I think Lemmy.ml just upgraded to a 6 core cpu and 32gb of ram and they have 30k+ members.