https://tailscale.com/kb/1054/dns

I suppose it depends. An 4/8gb RPi 4 may be able to handle a smalll instance, keeping in mind that a 2 core/4gb VPS has sufficed for most instances until the recent influx. My concern with using one would be primarily with storage capacity and speeds, but iirc, there’s a SATA hat you can get to connect drives directly (as opposed to external USB storage).

A good frame of reference would be the VPS that lemmy.world is running on imo. Looks like they upgraded to a 4 core/16gb setup to handle the influx of users, so if your instance is running under 1k users, I believe those specs would be sufficient.

If it starts chugging, I wonder how well it’d work to run the server on the laptop and the DB on a VPS (or vice versa).