As someone who self hosts things for fun i see no drawback to running my own instance and limiting it to a hand full of people i know. The hardware requirements for a small server are minimal enough most any older laptops laying around could likely handle it. Yes, i can only see communities i’ve interacted with and you could argue that limits my experience but i’ll argue that out allows me to tailor my experiences to my tastes. There are plenty of search options and auto populating softwares that my feed is plenty full enough as is.
As someone who self hosts things for fun i see no drawback to running my own instance and limiting it to a hand full of people i know. The hardware requirements for a small server are minimal enough most any older laptops laying around could likely handle it. Yes, i can only see communities i’ve interacted with and you could argue that limits my experience but i’ll argue that out allows me to tailor my experiences to my tastes. There are plenty of search options and auto populating softwares that my feed is plenty full enough as is.