.
How powerful should my hardware be?
I think 512mb ram is probably a bit too low. There is a risk for the pc to crash at some point. I think 1 GB+ should be fine.
Which ports do I need opened to operate a lemmy instance for my personal use (i’m only going to be connecting from home)?
To avoid opening ports you can use Cloudflare tunnel as you mentioned.
Only other option is probably renting a cheap vps. Here is a cheap vps options for 2.5$
If you have the ability then self hosting is the best option
Otherwise I think instances with less users and content will be quicker, but then the all feed will probably be smaller.
I will also recommend my own instance endlesstalk.org. It is very small(10 users) and the server is located in Germany. Hopefully that is close to where you live, so the latency is low.
Photoprism
I’ll recommend my own instance at endlesstalk.org. There you can create a community, if you want. lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works might also allow creating of new communities, but I haven’t checked.
Usually, it is correct, that the all feed would be smaller on a small instance, but “seeders”, like lcs or lemmony can make the feed in all tab much larger.
It does this by subscribing to a lot communites. Lcs does for specific communities and lemmony subscribes to everything. You can see an example of an all tab with many subscriptions(added via lemmony) at my instance
I think the easist way to check, if an instance uses one of these seeders is to check the number of subscriptions in the instance. Or just ask the admin for the instance.
For s3 iDrive e2 is cheaper. It costs 4$ per month, if you pay monthly and down to ca 3$, if you pay yearly.
The egress policy is mostly the same as backblaze. You get 3 times the storage you pay for. With backblaze you get 3 times the average amount of data you have stored.