I continue to see people stumble at mastodon resource requirements when setting up their instance, but I fail to understand why everyone is going for a mastodon instance for their personal use.

I am running https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial on a micro instance, probably using 100M ram, with a 30M sqlite database.

True, I don't have all features. It is pure backend, but I can use https://pinafore.social/ as web client and https://f-droid.org/en/packages/su.xash.husky/ as Android app. It implements a good chunk of the Mastodon API. I also use it from Emacs with mastodon.el.

Took me 35 minutes to setup. It runs as a single binary from systemd. Most of the jail features enabled. Not even a system user (DynamicUser).

Mastodon != Fediverse.