I was very tempted to create and operate an instance for me and my friends, since Digital Ocean have a nice pre-built image that's ready to go, but it never left the "that would be fun, I should read into that" phase. I hope you don't mind but I'm about to fire off a bunch of questions - if you're too busy to answer just don't feel like answering, I won't feel offended :) How are you finding it, is it just yourself or do you have a few more users? Do you have to deal with abuse/spam much? Also what kind of hardware do you have it on - is it pretty memory/cpu hungry ever or is it quite well-behaved?

Mine's on masto.host, so it's managed; costs me a few bucks a month and I'm happy with it. It's just for me, so all my follows are federated; as such, spam/abuse has been non-existent.

Ah I hadn't heard of masto.host, ok that's another thing to look into. Thanks!

2 cores and 4 GB memory is more than adequate for a <10 users. My instance runs on an old Celeron NUC sitting on the shelf above the litter box and connects to the internet through a cloudflare tunnel. Works great, and is basically free to run.

Ah funny, I didn't think to look if there was tunneling that let me serve local stuff publicly (I have a NUC tucked away somewhere in my flat, I had it serving some stuff thru SSH tunneling to a Digital Ocean droplet until I realised "why am I not just running this on my droplet?")

Akkoma is a very good option if you're concerned about resource usage. I proxy media from other servers and then let it hit a managed CDN (bunny.net in this case). My CDN bill is less than 10 cents per month.