One of the devs mentioned that the biggest draw on server resources is the direct web interaction, and loading pages, not the behind-the-scenes federation, where the database queries are simpler and the actions can be queued up and retried as needed. (I think apps would have the same issue since the server’s going to be doing the same kind of massive database queries to build your feed.)

If your comment takes a few minutes to get from your home server to another one when the site’s overloaded, it’s not a huge deal, but if your comment takes a few minutes to get from your browser to your server, the site’s basically down.

So moving yourself to a new server takes over the entire real-time load you would have been using, and the additional background load of sending threads to/from your server is a lot smaller.

As far as I understand, at least the Text Data (posts?) is replicated to your instance. So if you are only 1 person using your own instance, I think it should neither hurt not help the network. But if there are 2 or more people using your instance (Family / Friends) and they are interested in some of the same content, they will fetch that content from your server and not from the original servers (minus the pictures AFAIK). So it causes a bit less stress on the server that hosts the content your users are consuming.

I am all new to this, so take this with a grain of salt.

Well, as you mentioned before it’s to enjoy the “technical aspect”, which could be many reasons. For one, if the instance you signed up on shuts down there goes your account with it. I feel better self-hosting because I am in control of when/if it shuts down.

At the very least (and a sizable concern) is that any images you upload would at least be stored on your server. At least I think. Also self hosting…