Are there benefits to hosting your own personal lemmy?

Yes. I am immune from the beehaw/lemmy.world drama or similar. I can block instances as I please and I can tinker with my instance.

I can tinker with my instance.

I didn't even find a SANE way to set it up with Docker without having to tinker with the instance. I just want a container not generating half a dozen of other containers and volumes.
There is already drama? Lol
- Eh, kinda. lemmy doesn’t have super great moderation tools yet, and the influx of users on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml included people posting some content that was against beehaw’s moderation guidelines. Rather than deal with being overwhelmed without much option, they decided to temporarily defederate until there was a clear path to resolving the issue (i.e. better mod tools).
  
  I think people are making it out to be a bigger deal than it really is, and those flames are probably being stoked by the trolls.
  
  There are plenty of “no actually assault weapons are good for society” and “actually Ukraine is the aggressor” groypers around now, but I guess that just means Lemmy is getting popular enough to attract the masses - which in the end is a net positive.

There are two big benefits in my opinion.

Speed and responsiveness. When the bigger instances were (or are) overloaded, my Lemmy experience was still fast and snappy. Content was slower to update for those big instances, but navigating Lemmy itself was still fine, and it gave me an opportunity to engage with some smaller communities.
Control of federation. I decide who to federate with, and as long as I follow other instance and community rules, I won't get defederated.

The biggest downside is that I can't discover new communities organically since I'm the only real active user of my instance. Nothing new gets federated unless I seek it out. But I solve that by using a fediverse indexer every week or so to search for popular or interesting communities.

I was curious to see what discovery was like. I'm wondering if anyone if working on a solution for that
- There are some fediverse listing sites out there, including one that maps old subreddits to where the community has moved to in the fediverse (includes kbin and lemmy); but these actual services are not quite to the point yet where they have much discoverability built in.
  
  It’s on the roadmap for sure, but as stated by the lemmy devs, the sudden influx of users has revealed many bugs, including some related to scalability, and for the time being they’re focused on that just to make sure the whole thing doesn’t collapse under its own weight. They’d rather have something working that isn’t complete than to focus on new features but everyone leaves because it’s crashing every few minutes.
But I solve that by using a fediverse indexer every week or so to search for popular or interesting communities.

Is there a way to automatically federate with other instances? Because I started my own Lemmy instance, and its annoying having to manually go to every community in order to federate with it. (The instance is for my own personal use, so I won't be opening registrations)
- Absolutely, there are two tools I use to do so.
  
  Lemmy Community Seeder - Very customizable tool that by default grabs the top 50 posts in the top 50 communities of the specified instances every few hours.
  
  Lemmony - Less customizable tool that by default grabs pretty much everything. Probably less ideal for larger or more active instances, but my instance has 5 or 6 users, only a couple of which are active, so this tool has been awesome for populating my "All" feed.
  
  I recommend creating a non-admin bot account and using that for these tools.

More private, if you're overly conscious about your IP being tracker by instance host
You own your data
You can experiment with alpha releases
You can customize everything. Default CSS, javascript, etc
You can't be censored (only defederated)

Not the OP, but can you move your account to a private instance or is it not possible at the moment?
- It's not possible at the moment. Lemmy devs acknowledged it was a widely requested feature but last I read, they were focused on maintaining the performance of Lemmy during the spike of users during the great Reddit migration.
- Not yet, that's (open) issue #1985: Moving user profile to a new instance.
  
  The devs also explicitly mentioned this request in their statement:
  
  we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won’t have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.
  
  For now, you can create another account on another instance and use that instead (or both), or just peek how the experience might be.
You can customize everything. Default CSS, javascript, etc

I use a browser extension to modify CSS client side

You can't be censored (only defederated)

The law can censor you (although you could put a Lemmy instance on i2p)

Everything else you said is right
- Are there turnkey solutions or extensions that theme Lenny in whole or in part or are you rolling your own? I’m definitely interested in modifying the look of the site a bit. Mostly I find it overly narrow.
Do I truly own my own data then? If I make a post, such as this, which is posted from lemmy.world to lemmy.ml, would my removal of the post on my instance remove it from lemmy.ml as well?
- You truly own you data in the sense that it's not in somebody else's hands, but once you decide to share it with other instances, you should assume it's public for everyone. That's just how the internet works.
- If the instance your account is on decides to shutdown, you lose everything, your account and all your contributions, on your own instance you don't.

It means that you aren't subject to anyone else's decision making or the effects of that like defederation. But obviously there are implications on cost and work for you

You end up as the ultimate decider on what you federate with. If you join someone else’s community you might not agree with their administration or moderation decisions.

It’s a fun exercise in system administration, it taught me some new things. It got me interested in Rust as a programming language (not that you need to know that to run an instance - I was just tinkering w: source code)

Do you mean hosting a server just for your own personal use? Technical knowhow aside there are pros and cons.

Pros:

You're very unlikely to get defederated from anywhere and can control exactly who you defederate from
You're not at the whim of your server owner suddenly deciding to shut down one day
You can decide whether or not to host communities on your server, in which case you'll have control over exactly which ones get to be hosted there

Cons:

You'll need to search harder for communities to build up your subscription feed because you won't have other users searching and indexing new things all the time, so you'll be fairly reliant on sites like lemmyverse.net at least at first.
Anecdotally I've heard that once you've got some bigger communities federated with your own, the database storage requirements can be surprisingly big. That's just from off-hand comments from other admins though, I don't know enough to comment or have any hard numbers on it.

@thegiddystitcher @RedirectedPotato
Another con: You become an admin/moderator and have to keep up to date with the latest bad servers to defederate from and you’ll have to deal with all kind of bad posts yourself instead of relying on a moderation team.
If I made my own instance would the domain of my server be exposed everywhere I submit or comment or is there a way to keep that from being published?
The second point makes sense, they are basically pushing all of their content to you

I've created my own instance, just because I wanted to see how and I like self-hosting. The only drawback I found at the moment is that my instance seems several comments/posts behind reality. Wish it was faster, can sometimes be hours behind.

Is it technically possible to host the instance on the same machine you use for browsing lemmy?

Are there any guides on the topic?

So based on my understanding, you'd need a public endpoint, and probably a domain name as well. So if the system you are using has a public ip, a domain, and is always online, then yes.

So technically yes, realistically no

You become your own admin, with all the privileges and rights therein. You are also less likely to be defederated since your server is less likely to create problems with other servers.

Not that i've done it, but can have some benefits: uptime, create your own communities, less server overload, restrict users, use it only for friends/family.

Also there are some for specific topics like "Path of Exile" (game), Star Trek, FOSS.

As well as specific countries: Germany, Netherlands, Poland, etc

I'd like to know this too, Im curious about the feddiverse (sp?)

From my own observations, selfhosting bypasses issues the main sites like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world have with their sites.

I've seen both have some issues today already