Recently there have been two more PieFed instances created, which offer accounts to anyone who wants one:
Feddit.online is hosted in USA which should make it a little faster for people there. It also has a different topic structure at https://feddit.online/topics than PieFed.social has.
Roughly 2 GB of RAM, 2 cores of CPU. PieFed.social has 8 GB and 4 cores for 150 users and that is more than enough power. We haven’t had a very busy instance with thousands of users so the only scaling tests have been to do with federation - “what happens if I join every community”. The UI is very lightweight, tho.
It really depends how many communities you subscribe to. A single user instance might be able to use less.
So someone like me that has a couple hundred subscriptions is a far bigger server load that someone who browses via all?
Yeah, sort of. The total number of subscriptions (by all users) determines the load caused by federation. If you subscribe to 200 communities then I subscribe to the same 200 the federation load will not increase.
So once an instance has more than a dozen users pretty much every community that exists will be subscribed to and adding more users will not increase federation load (but it would increase load caused by the UI)
Thank you!