It's been many years since HP did good deals on these and also the
last revision or two were a lot worse spec than in the heyday of
Microservers. There's nothing comparable now from HP/Lenovo nor any
indication that there will be, sadly.
Indeed. I stopped buying them new long ago, when they started putting firmware updates behind a paywall.
I did pick up an HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 with a "Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz" CPU and 16GB RAM from eBay a while back as a general purpose home server. It's perhaps unsurprisingly way better / faster than the old N40/N54 Microservers of yore.
That said (and getting back nearer the topic) I did run a mastodon instance on one of the old N54L's for a bit last year. It was just about man for the job, but only for a single user, I don't think it would have coped with a bunch of users, and certainly wouldn't have been able to run elastic search.
I moved the instance (
https://ubuntu.social) to a chunky VPS where it runs fine. I'll probably retire the old Microservers, as I have no real use for them at the moment.
Cheers,
Al.