The documentation should answer most of your questions.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/introduction.html

I installed mine using the instructions here. I did run in to an issue with docker-compose, for which I submitted this pull request (assuming that PR is not merged by the time you clone the repo).

They recommend the Ansible setup found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible

Their main docs site does have instructions for running via docker(-compose), but they seem to be pretty broken right now.

I'm running Lemmy and Authentik (authentication broker for my Mastodon instance) on one of the $14/month AMD premium droplets and it's working fine. (1vCPU 2Gb RAM). Though I'm the only user currently and my instance has only been up for about an hour lol.

I just set up my instance using the Ansible playbook. It takes a few manual configuration steps, and the rest is automatic provided you can SSH into the server and get root access.

There's official documentation for how to get up and running quickly using Docker here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html

I used that as a reference for my own server's setup (which is heavily modified appropriately for my own environment).

Officially https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

There is also this https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy/tree/main

I rolled my own docker-compose.yml because I host other services using Caddy as well

Does anybody know the hardware requirements? A RaspberryPi, some small VPS with 1 cpu and 1gb ram, or 4 core vps with 16 gb ram? Is the traffic cache-able by cloudflare?