There’s plenty of room for creators who don’t want monetization or can monetize things themselves by utilizing product placements (if the platform were popular enough).
The biggest problem is federation (or lack thereof). I’ve looked at A LOT of instances, and most of them either don’t federate at all, or only federate with a handful of other instances, as opposed to Lemmy or Mastodon that federate with thousands of others…
This means it is deeply segregated and discoverability is virtually nada, not to mention the default algorithms are completely useless and uneditable.
Whats your budget?
My go-to recommendation is the barebones CWWK N100 development board. Then you can add as much RAM and storage as you want. Up to 4xNVMe and 2x SATA drives are supported.
It also uses a normal PC fan jnstead of those whiny-ass laptop fans.
Thats what I use.