Since it's a public instance you'd want to be sure to keep it pretty up-to-date with new system patches and the latest stable versions of Nextcloud. If you're comfortable with automating updates with ansible, k8s, docker-compose, etc. then it's not a big deal. If you're ssh'ing to a server to manually update things then it's going to be a lot of overhead and likely forgotten.
Old hardware may also bring its own issues and you'll need backups especially since old hardware (especially consumer-grade stuff) can fail very unexpectedly. And providing support for users is a whole... other thing...
I like the idea of starting with the "old laptop in a basement" approach as a way to get things going to see if the service provides benefit then look to migrate to a more stable platform in the future.
Since it's a public instance you'd want to be sure to keep it pretty up-to-date with new system patches and the latest stable versions of Nextcloud. If you're comfortable with automating updates with ansible, k8s, docker-compose, etc. then it's not a big deal. If you're ssh'ing to a server to manually update things then it's going to be a lot of overhead and likely forgotten.
Old hardware may also bring its own issues and you'll need backups especially since old hardware (especially consumer-grade stuff) can fail very unexpectedly. And providing support for users is a whole... other thing...
I like the idea of starting with the "old laptop in a basement" approach as a way to get things going to see if the service provides benefit then look to migrate to a more stable platform in the future.