Just slap the drives into an old optiplex or something similar honestly. If you’re just streaming it to 1-2 people at a time you won’t need anything too powerful

Running on my own hardware at the moment, I’m looking into VPS options though. Its a VM on a dell R720, gave it 8 CPU cores and 16 GB RAM (It’s ddr3 though). I’m literally the only person using my instance at the moment, but performance has been great. Some issues federating with lemmy.ml, but I’m pretty sure that’s on their end since every other instance works fine. Really the biggest downside has been there’s nobody else to subscribe to communities to get the federation started, so every new subscription is pretty much empty for a while.

It’s been taking a bit of tweaking since I decided to host my own instance, but when it works it’s fantastic. Feels like the social media of 10 years ago.

It means community, like how on reddit it was /r/ for subReddit