As someone who hosts a small instance, nothing massive....

Honestly, nothing.

The only benefit I get- is full control over weather my instance is up or two. I know for absolute certain that my instance isn't going to randomly shutdown, and not come back online.

I also have the benefit of having a lot of control over how fast my instance is, and performance optimizations as needed to make it perform as I would like. As such, for me, the performance is outstanding.

With that said,

Basically everything else is downsides.

Having to proactively moderate content originating from your server, is a drag. The moderation tools in Lemmy are absolute dog-shit. Your only option here is to use either 3rd party tools (lemmy-helper), or to just run database queries.

PictRS just keeps growing and growing. pictures gets synced to every instance, and those take up room. Lots of room. PictRS has even less moderation tools then lemmy. If you want to make sure your user aren't uploading illicit/illegal content, is a major pain in the ass. My solution was to run a few scripts to fetch all of the content, and just run it through some AI scanning software to attempt to detect bad content. But, still, a pain in the ass.

Those attacks you read about here on lemmy world. Those happen to our smaller instances too. Every time you hear @ruud@lemmy.world doing an update here- we are also working on plans for updating the instance. Granted- my small user base makes these upgrades much easier and faster. But- we will have to do these updates. (At least on the plus side, my instances isn't constantly under a DOS attack, due to a disgruntled member, or due to a pissed off instance which was defederated)

And, lastly, one downside of lemmy- things don't really go away or get cleaned up. Your database and storage will continue to grow and grow, and grow. Again, to restate, There are basically no moderation or administration tools included with lemmy. You can see reports. You can ban users. And, you can delete posts. Thats about it.

There isn't an easy way to even list users, comments, posts, or activity happening on your instances.... through lemmy itself.

On top of those other issues, lemmy is very chatty, network wise.

Here are the incoming stats, from my "small" instance.

In terms of outgoing, it's very chatty there too. You will find all sorts of weird and random outbound DNS records.

tldr; Its prob not worth hosting your own instance, unless you just really like playing around with infrastructure, networking, databases, and digging through application issues.

Personally though- I enjoy the challenge, and that is one reason I keep doing it.

I don't need to worry about the instance going down due to attacks, because no one is going to spend their time attacking an instance with one person. They want to attack an instance with everyone.

I also don't need to worry about defederation drama. If I'm not subscribed to any communities on those problem instances, I don't even see the problem, and my server doesn't rehost those problems. I was originally on lemmy.world, and then Beehaw defederate with lemmy.world. But I wanted to see Beehaw's content. Now I can see both. No one is going to defederate with me because no one on my instance (literally just me) is doing anything that would get us defederated.

I also don't need to wait for my instance to update to get new features. I literally just update my instance as soon it gets posted to Docker Hub.

I also just find it fun to host my own! I already had my domain name and wasn't using it for anything. I already had a server ready to go. So why not?

In my case, the major upside is that I make federation choices, not someone else. I prefer to be as openly federated as possible.