@brettm akkoma's been good. IIRC the frontend needs javascript enabled (it's light enough tho), but you can use other frontends for it easily.
I currently have an iceshrimp.net and an akkoma instance and the akkoma one uses much less resources than the iceshrimp one (like by quite a bit). I'm sure both are much more efficient than mastodon tho
I think akkoma uses postgres by default, not sure which fedi software uses sqlite