Couldn’t you just create the communities on an existing server? Obviously it would be good to not be on the biggest one to help spread out the community, as that’s the point of federation. If it’s on a server with existing users, you’re more likely to get members join as it will show in their local feed.

First of all I would recommend you use Piefed instead. Easier to setup and maintain.

But I am not sure exactly what you want that Lemmy/Piefed instance for? As an internal forum of sorts? That can work, but is not really what it was developed for and there are better (non-federated) options.

If you want it to be an actually federated instance then the Rasberry will not cut it. The desktop might, if it has some good SSD storage for the database.

For in game voice-chat the simplest option is a Mumble server. Very low resource use and runs great on a Rasberry like yours. Otherwise you could also try setting up a Movim instance. It has text chat and voice/video calls that should reasonably work as a Discord substitute for small groups. It is also quite low resource and should run fine on that Rasberry.

Disclaimer: I might be talking out of my ass here but this is how I think it works, to the best of my knowledge.

The safest way would be to make an instance that only hosts the communities; it has no users and therefore federates no subscriptions of other communities who’s content you may need to police for stuff like CSAM that isn’t caught right away. You’d only need to monitor and moderate your own communities created on the instance.

I’m not sure but you might need one account to be an admin/ moderator for the communities you create? Just don’t subscribe to any off-instance communities with it and it shouldn’t federate those posts.

Folks on other communities will interact with it via someone from their instance subscribing to it; so discoverability might present an issue.

I want to set up a Lemmy server too (currently still deciding between Lemmy and PieFed) to host some basic content that we create at a university group with the public. It’s more like a blog than anything else, at least as envisioned. I’d also like to add some cool features to it like auto-posting (i.e. we have a bot that automatically uploads certain posts).

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #1007 for this comm, first seen 19th Jan 2026, 02:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Are you maybe looking for something like Revolt or Spacebar?

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https://lemmy.world/post/41184531