Which Lemmy instance is this?

Bro that's the Reddit server.

They've upgraded due the IPO, they now also have a fake serverroom with a bunch of blinkenlight generators

Those Blinkenlight generators are obviously trained by AI to make it look more realistic

Unplug it real quick so we can find out

A temporary fix for overloaded lemmy.ml servers, via THAIO (Throw-Hardware-At-It Optimisation)...

Sadly there's only one server since Lemmy doesn't support horizontal scaling (hopefully for now only)
- This sounds like something we need. I'm sure it's much harder to implement than I imagine (I'm not a programmer, just a geek). Lemmy needs more devs.
Nothing more permanent than a temporary solution

I actually ran a moderately active (like 20,000 hits a day) small business site from a laptop for a couple years. Of course one of the first thing I did was put a "SERVER DO NOT SHUT DOWN" sticker on it, and set the power settings so closing the lid did not shut down or sleep the computer. It was a Dell 7000 series with 16GB IIRC, it did great.

Not advertising here, but with this low traffic you could be in a permanent free tier with AWS with all the availability guarantees. It doesn't work with EC2, but for serverless solutions (ApiGateway, Lambda, DynamoDB) they have something like "we start charging after 1M calls per month" (don't quote me on this exact number). I have a couple of pet projects working this way

This looks like my old laptop - Lenovo Y510P. Even down to the slight abrasion below the mousepad from the user wearing a watch with a metal band.

It had SLI GPUs in a laptop through the ultra bay. It was a beast for about 20 minutes until the heat built up.

laughs in "stay awake even if lid is closed" settings in linux.

I used to work for a notebook manufacturer, and it was a non-trivial part of the cooling strategy that the lid is open under load.

I hope they've changed, but megacorps usually don't.
That's my netbook server.

Please use an ethernet cable, you gonna need to keep that connection spotless and WiFi are vulnerable no matter which protocols, better turn it off.

If I may also add install a custom firmware on your router(Rec. Tomato series most updated)/hardware firewall(Rec. pfSense) with a VPS if the network is used for other means, they will help you in the long-term.

It should go without saying if you can't secure a server, don't host one. You're responsible for anything that happens to it & us.

Don't worry comrade, this is a humor community ;) Thanks for the well-intentioned advice though.

I have an old Raspberry Pi 1 lying around. Should I spin up my own instance?

I'm actually thinking about doing this exact thing with my own rpi b rev2 from 2012. I'm not sure it'll even run a kbin/Lemmy instance though

What specs do I need to run a lemmy instance for, say a small group of 1000 people? Cpu, Ram, Amount of Electricity needed, Minimum Internet Speed, Storage? Assuming that I would be federating with the top lemmy instances.

I think it would be possible to run it on that laptop. But the only way to find out is if you try for us!!
I've heard of people running (Mastodon, not lemmy, but it's probably comparable) off a raspberry pi, but I doubt that'd be feasible for more than a few users. I might set that up for self-hosting though