The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience.
Scores are federated, resulting in a consistent global feed across instances and a lack of uniqueness for each instance. I wish hosting an instance provided a more customized experience like this. It would be a great incentive.
I tried setting up an instance for my personal use today out of curiosity. So far the most notable personal benefits have been much more responsive site and easier time curating what I seeon my feed. The latter is easy enough since my feed only includes posts from communities people on my instance have subscribed to… which is also quite a downside since I’m the only one on the instance…
Oh and I’m able to federate with whomever I want, compared to if I were on lemmy.world, I couldn’t see posts from beehaw.org and vice versa. I’ll also sleep soundly knowing that the stupid pictures I’ll be uploading (too lazy to upload them on external site) won’t be filling up someone else’s precious servers.
How much ballache was it to set up? Docker compose up or much fucking about?
It’s easy if you use this: https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
It was… a project. I’m guessing if one has more experience in hosting it would be easier to figure out. I kept running into error after error, but eventually after spending most of the day on it I did somehow get it working… for now.
After all that I open Lemmy and see a post about easy deploy (linked by squid in response to your comment)… So I decided to give it a try and instance was up in minutes without any errors or issues. That was both very nice and very painful to see!
https://lemmy.todayyoutomorrow.me/post/850
Use the LCS app to add communities automatically to your instance. I was quite disappointed to see that I had to manually add every community and wouldn’t be able to have the classic ALL page I was used to but this solved that. It runs on a schedule and automatically adds communities based on your criteria.
Thanks for the tip! I thought something like this probably exists, but didn’t have energy to look it up after the installation fatigue. I’m not quite yet decided whether I want to add communities manually or automate it, I’ll probably first see whether I’ll add a couple of friends to the instance or not, and what they might think.
Even if I don’t add anyone to the instance, using All as a type of custom feed would be an option too, adding communities more liberally than I would for Subscribed… Perhaps the way Lemmy does this isn’t as bad as I first thought!