Selfhosted

I've been looking to do the same for the many pros I've seen posted here, but maybe someone can give me some clarity on a very big downside to me.

From my understanding most instances are pretty liberal with federating anyone, then blacklisting bad actots or problematic instances. However as adoption grows is there not the potential for larger instances to move towards a whitelist, and possibly move towards only federating with known, established instances or ones with established conditions? Possibly flat out banning personal instances due to moderation overhead?

Perhaps my understanding is incorrect, but seems to me that there could be a big future risk your personal server turns into an island and all of your past engagement is no longer in your control.

I'm in the process of upgrading my Plex server, once that's done I plan hosting my own Lemmy instance on the old server to test it out for personal use.

You absolutely don't need to be hosting any communities and can use it just for your own control over your access to the fediverse.

I run my own instance because I have the resources, I intend to create communities and it is much more private this way.

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