Would there be any benifit to host another instance?
As the question states. I have the skiils and know how to setup a new instsnce and from looking through the documentation its relatively straight forward. Im just wondering would it actually help the fediverse and lemmy as a whole? There seems to already be plenty of instances to choose from. What are your guys thoughts?
Would it make any sense to stand up my own instance, federated with what I want, follow the communities I want from other instances, and just ignore the rest? Is there any reason to not do that?
If you're happy to pay whatever it costs to host then there's no other disadvantage to this.
The only thing I can think of is if you somehow end up at odds with an admin of a big instance and they defederate your instance. Or perhaps in the future major instances decide to only federate with instances of a certain size, for some as of now unpredictable reason
Really, if your instance is just for you and your account (maybe a few friends, family), and you're not running any communities on it (all your posts and comments are on other instances), there's really no reason anyone would defed you. Unless you're a dick.
I have to think that if your very small private instance was federated with a large public instance, your instance would pull down content from the public one. That's bandwidth, and that's costing the large instance some amount of money/performance. Because your small private instance isn't "giving back" a level of content that the large instance would want or need, that could be the unpredictable reason you mentioned.
Now, I don't see that being a real issue unless there are so many low-content instances that Large Instance reviews their usage and finds out that an unacceptably high portion of their bandwidth is being used by "leeches," and wants to control cost.