That's pretty much it for me. There's a lot of complexity in hosting that you don't have to do if you use someone else's instance. There's a risk that their server goes down, but most people who start big servers know what they're doing.

Its also advantageous to join the instance you want to interact most in. Interacting across instances is possible but still a little buggy. It's harder to find communities, and once you do, sometimes posts don't load.

In addition to that,

• I like the challenge of leaning new technologies and hosting my own web apps
• It lets me feel that I have a bit more control over my user and posts
• I get my own vanity domain / user address
• I get a good understanding of how the lemmy frontend, backend and database work (yay open-source!)
• I can keep my instance up to date with the latest lemmy releases (some are still running 0.17.3!)
• I can do some dev work and testing on my instance, if I want, without impacting others
• it reduces load on the main instances

There’s more, but I think that’s a good enough list for now. Have a nice day!