Can't recommend spinning up a second account on a smaller instance enough. It's made the experience so much faster than it was using my account on .world
i had mine up for about a week, been running lcs for quite a few days, and both actively use other spaces (like this one) and post a lot in the ones on my instance. currently i'm sitting at 4.5 GB for pictrs (not a typo, that's what the picture server is called), 2.3 GB for the postgres database, and 5.4 GB for docker. total disk usage is about 14 GB for now, i expect it to grow in the future but idk yet how fast it will be. people are reporting about 100 MB a day since the reddit migration, and tbh that might check out.
if you're hosting it on your own nas you're probably gonna be fine space-wise. i'd just recommend to layer a vpn and/or a cache in-between -- i don't know exactly how to do this, i went straight for the cloud route, but i have seen people in !selfhosted@lemmy.world doing that, and the lemmy admin matrix chat is nice too.
just fyi, your instance does have to be reachable on a domain if you want federation to work. also, keep everything you can on the defaults and only change things one by one, the error messages are not very helpful. i spent like a day trying to debug why lemmy wasn't starting up at first, turns out i just had an instance name longer than 20 characters.
I've had my own instance running on a puny 1VCPU/1G RAM instance at Vultr since the beginning of June and the resource usage has been negligible. Drive space is the largest resource it's consumed, it's at about 12GB of drive space consumed in a month.
I wish more of the apps let you enter a custom server URL which would encourage this aspect of the fediverse. I currently use connect for lemmy, its great but only has 3 static server options.
You can add custom instances on Liftoff (!liftoff@lemmy.world). It has .world, .ml, and beehaw as the defaults but you can add instances manually as well. I'm using it right now and added lemm.ee
Oh yeah I've done the same thing. My primary is on Lemmy.world I'm posting this from my secondary account, Sh.itjust.works is relatively fast for me and a lot less error prone I've noticed.
You can check out this page that keeps an updated list of "recommended" instances based on their performance and various other stats. Take a peek and see if their rules sound like something you want to be part of.
Someone shared this instance map yesterday. It's not a complete map of instances as far as I can tell, but perhaps it can help you find a smaller one closer to you.
Yeah I’m happy with the performance on lemm.ee so far. I was on lemmy.world but I kept running to “failed to fetch” errors and overall slowness. I’m not surprised, given by how many users are on lemmy.world, but it goes to show the importance of decentralization for Lemmy (and the fediverse in general).