I don’t think its too bad, but it probably depends a lot on a lot of factors.

Since I first started my hardware got a lot stronger, and nextcloud, php, and mariadb have all improved and so my experience has gotten pretty decent.

Remember though, there’s a ton of biases here, so I could be wrong…

Nextcloud Notes has become my go-to (Oh look, SJ is advocating for Nextcloud again! How original!)

I’m cheap.

So far, Conduit is the only answer for me, since I don’t own any quantum supercomputers.

I think it depends a lot on the federated service.

For mastodon, you follow individual users, so if there’s a million users or ten million or a hundred million, their instances will only be contacting other intances they’re federating with so it’s quite scalable.

For Lemmy, you follow communities, so every server pulls all the posts and comments the common community. This means that for an instance like lemmy.world hosting lots of different big communities, every new server hammers the one central instance.

A strategy for improving the situation I think would be to spread the load. Instead of everyone piling into megacommunities, if people spread out into smaller more tight knit communities over many different instances. Of course, this isn’t really compatible with the purpose of having communities like that.

It does seem to suggest that ActivityPub isn’t necessarily the most appropriate protocol for this purpose, even though it’s what was used because it’s the de facto standard on the fediverse.

• Lemmy
• Searx
• Matrix
• Xmpp
• Soapbox
• Lotide
• Peertube
• Nextcloud
• Nostr
• Wordpress
• Plex (sorta borderline of this counts)
• Invidious
• Pfsense

Running on a total of 5 fanless commercial grade sign PCs. That’s why the motto of my websites is “this site runs of parts scavenged from a roadside sign”

1x core 2 duo running Lemmy

2x atom d2550s running xmpp, matrix, lotide, searx, nostr, and invidious

2x core i5 4000 series running everything else

I try to run bare metal so I can stick my fingers into things.