The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience.
Scores are federated, resulting in a consistent global feed across instances and a lack of uniqueness for each instance. I wish hosting an instance provided a more customized experience like this. It would be a great incentive.
How much ballache was it to set up? Docker compose up or much fucking about?
It was… a project. I’m guessing if one has more experience in hosting it would be easier to figure out. I kept running into error after error, but eventually after spending most of the day on it I did somehow get it working… for now.
After all that I open Lemmy and see a post about easy deploy (linked by squid in response to your comment)… So I decided to give it a try and instance was up in minutes without any errors or issues. That was both very nice and very painful to see!