I'm pretty sure OEMs pay Google for including Play Store in their device, and they still decided to show ads. My Chromecast with Google TV shows no ads at the moment, not sure if it's due to using Adguard in my home network or if Google simply hasn't roll out ads in my country yet.
So, the price of the hardware is not an indication whether the device will have ads or not later down the line? Even if you spent your money on the top of the line models it'll eventually got ads if it's running Google TV OS?
and hosting a VPS with the resources required for this is way too expensive for me.
If you're ok with using VPS from bottom-tier providers, you can get them for 10x cheaper than the usual cloud providers (or more during holiday sales) on lowendtalk.com.
Try limiting the database connection pool size too in lemmy.hjson. It helped a lot in my instance. I set mine to 30 in a small server with 8gb ram. You can set it to even lower value for lower postgres memory consumption.
Yeah, this is why I have small swap on my servers. I'd rather the process got killed by the oom killer and got restarted automatically instead of running very slowly and trashing the entire server when it uses too much memory.
But at the same time, quality of life is rapidly improving which means energy usage per capita will eventually ramp up to similar level with average western citizen's energy usage.
Linus is also said to be a sweet guy IRL and only became the angry kernel guy on the mailing list.