You know, I agree that this is definitely the beauty of Lemmy’s federated nature but I’m somewhat perplexed by statements like “I can do whatever I want”. I mean for sure, in theory you definitely can, but were really being held back before? I just personally have never actually run up against the limits of my freedoms online and being unable to do something I want to do. I’m probably just super vanilla and boring I suppose. I guess the recent shit with Reddit is an example where I really was constricted, by virtue of no longer having the choice of mobile app to access the website through, but then, I just jumped ship to Lemmy. I can imagine I might run in to a situation where the admins of the instance I signed up to block a community I liked, but it’s very rare that this is a community that I care about and when it is, there’s almost always another server around I can make an account for and sign up to all the same communities as before. I guess in typing this I’m seeing that the answer is that, with your own instance you won’t have to keep hopping, but I guess I just so rarely get inconvenienced by admin decisions that it’s never seemed worth the trouble.
If it’s not too prying, can I ask what is it you want to, and in practice really would do, that running your own instance has now allowed you? Not just theoretical but, like a real existing capability that you’ve gained and make use of regularly? It’s appealing to me from a theoretical basis and sometimes the theory and principle alone is enough, but the effort barrier hasn’t seemed worth it for the theoretical gains alone.