I'm just trying to get a rough idea of the order of magnitude. Has this instance exceeded "old PC" (For discussion's sake, an 8 core i7-9700k with 32 gigabytes of RAM) yet?

How much does a Lemmy instance cost to host?

Either Reddit will back down, or it will very quickly grow. I would worry more for /r/startrek, but this community doesn't have a peer anywhere else.