Should I host my own instance if I don't intend to run a community?

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.

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.

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!

If you host your own, do you need to establish federation with all other instances or only with the ones you want to use communities from?

If I only federate with lemmy.world, would I be able to see comments on /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world on my instance made by a user from lemmy.ml?

Would a user that reads /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world on lemmy.ml see my comments, if I only federate with lemmy.world?

less thing to worries like you dont need an email to use it from single user instance, lemmy now dont have 2nd authentication like totp at the moment and it may have risk to get pawned and leak your email address so yeah it is better to run your own single user instance

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 :)

I think it's a matter of personal preference.

I've been running my own Mastodon instance for several months now, and I've enjoyed it. I don't have to rely on someone else, either, which is nice. I'm in control of everything on that instance.

As for Lemmy, I just started my own instance today, and am currently writing you from it. What made me decide to setup my own instance was some performance issues I was seeing with Lemmy.world, although that might have been an UI problem. Anyway, I enjoy doing this stuff, so I'm running my own instance for the sake of doing it.

On the flip side, it's more expensive and time consuming, and I'm the one who has to worry about backing up data, etc. Like I said, though, I enjoy doing it, so it's no big deal.