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.
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!