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 was actually wondering where my data is going when I comment when I have my own instance. Since I wouldn’t have any communities in my instance my data is still being saved in the instance of the community that I’m talking in? So if an instance decided one day to delete everything I would still lose that data anyway? Or is a copy of all my comments and posts saved in my instance as well?
It would seem unless you are going to create communities in your own instance nothing would really change data wise.
I’m just going to someone else’s home and writing something on their fridge. And then the owner burns the fridge. I think is an analogy?
Every server that federated the post will retain a local copy of it that can be interacted with. The control over my data is mostly me having control of what info gets put out there about me personally and who can access my private data on lemmy