I'd be curious to know how much overhead lemmy needs. Being built on rust, I can't imagine it's super resource intensive. I've been wanting to do some research into it. Might spin up a server and gauge it.
If things are relatively low-resource, it likely wouldn't be hard to find someone to volunteer hosting. I know I would, etc.
I also wonder if there is a way to load-balance lemmy instances. Hmm. Curious...