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.

As someone who likes having control over their data and especially backups, and someone who normally enjoys self-hosting things, I honestly might do it. I'm not sure if I'd want to host a lemmy instance or kbin instance though, since I know they all federate together anyway. I may also end up waiting until the software is more mature too before looking into it.

As someone that has spent the better part of the week mucking with it.... the kbin build docs have multiple gaps in the documentation and are functionally broken unless you have some better understanding of the setup. I WAS able to get the system built, but could never get it online. Best i got was 500 errors where the UI was up but there was a break somewhere in Redis, Postgres, Nginx etc. All the logs were clean though.

Lemmy was much easier to setup using the ansible method. I have an instance online. Though im still working out the federation thing and some other kinks. There are some gaps but it seems much more mature. For example you cant mark your instance private AND have federation enabled. If you do that and restart the instance will fail to come up, but theres no warning or error in the UI.

I like the kbin dev better as people. But the lemmy code is definately more polished, even if the devs are turd sammiches.

Well that's interesting, and somewhat like I expected but not really, I am surprised the setup process for kbin is that broken, although I guess it does make some sense since kbin is that much newer.