I took the easy way out for Mastodon with a managed host because I wanted to open it up to toher folks. But I did self host it for a bit and it was fine. Pleroma was a bit more to my liking, but Mastodon won out.
A couple of weeks ago, I did set up my Lemmy instance on a single core, 1GB RAM, 10GB HDD VPS. I’m not subscribed to a ton of communities and haven’t bothered with the different seeding scripts. So far so good though! I’m really happy with it.