@chris absolutely!
People interested in runing their own instance should instead look to GoToSocial, Akkoma, Snac2, some Misskey fork or Hollo.
All of those serves the purpose of single or multi-user instance and can be run in a old Raspberry Pi with only 512 MB of RAM (GoToSocial with sqlite as database).
I don't think Mastodon will ever be lightweight because of its inner gears and support software.