Karma inherently breeds monotony and circlejerking. When people “farm” for fake internet pointe by appealing to the oppinions of everyone else it leads to people just expressing one “right” (popular) oppinion.
I think we are fine without a karma system, but if you like it go ahead and use the extension. I’m happy I don’t have to worry about karma, and worst of all, karma minimums on communities here.
The comapny is called gehirn, which in the series in NERVs predecessor. They are full on aware of this.
I run my instance on a Quartz 64 with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. Works just fine.
On my instance there are two users, one being myself and the other one beein a seeder bot. It automatically pulls top communities and posts from other instances to keep the feed fresh. For this I wrote my own script, if you’d like to have it I can post it here or you can just use an already available project like this: LCS
Like that my post is always full with enough posts to keep me reading.
I use a quartz64 from pine. Back when it came out it was beefier than the rpi4. With the 5 that has now changed but it still is a great little machine.
My instance runs on it aswell as my other webservices (A Homepage, cgit instance and a small blog). Handles everything really well with the 8GiB of RAM.
Setup is a bit of a pain, especially because I had the urge to run gentoo on it. Compile times are actually acceptable.
It costs 80 bucks, which is really acceptable.
Edit: Forgot to mention energy efficiancy, ARM is unbeaten by x86 in that department. People on here recommend old PCs a lot, which, depending on your local energy prices could quiet quickly void the savings made by buying it. Also it has a SATA port, which requires some tinkering with the Devicetree to get running but allowed me to use an old 1TB SSD i had in the house.