I did. The benefits as I see them:

• I can still use Lemmy if the instance I would have used as my “home instance” ever went down.
• Even if a public instance doesn’t go down, all this extra load is making strange bugs surface that I don’t encounter (I still have the live refresh bug everyone has, but not this one).
• I have full control over my account.
• If I ever want to get to customizing my UI later, I can.
• Content I create originates on my instance, and I have full control over it. I can’t stop other instances from caching what I post publicly, but this still gives me more data governance.
• I can curate my “All” tab to only show stuff I actually want to see, instead of trying to figure out how to block communities (not sure if that’s possible for regular users).
• I get a custom domain which I think is pretty neat.

I run my own instance, the benefit is privacy and reliability. Everything is controlled on your own server. You also aren’t reliant on someone else running an instance that could go down at any time, either permanently or an outage. Been a problem with Lemmy.ml recently.

Pros: you [sort of] own your Fediverse identity; you can make any changes to your instance you want (if you know how to do it); you’re in control of whom you peer with.

Cons: maintenance burdens (especially if you make any changes); content discovery complexity; possibly slightly less privacy (as you’re the only user of the instance, whatever is visible about it can be directly attributed to your activity). All solvable, of course.

From what I’ve seen and read, server to server traffic is less taxing on instances than client to server. So even if your instance is JUST you, it would be your instance talking to everything else so it would have some net benefit on the federation. But it would take a lot of users self-hosting solo instances for this to help in any noticeable way, I’d think.

There is certainly no downside to running a solo instance, if you’re even slightly interested I would say go for it!

I did it. So far I’ve noticed a few things, for example you have to populate/federate the communities yourself, and it can take a long time. It took hours to retrieve and catch up all the lemmy.world posts. I expect it to be an ongoing thing. When you first connect to a community, it downloads the first 20 posts, but all the comments are empty.

The plus side though is it is very fast for me. And nobody can delete my profile.

For me the benefit is uniformity (not sure if thats a word) i can have a matrix account, a mastodon account, a lemmy account, all sorts of fediverse accounts all under my own domain.

This comes next to the already mentioned benefits ofcourse :)