It’s more than that. My instance is public. Though not currently running. Cloudflare lets you open your private network to the public without exposing your IP or opening ports.

Yeah good point. I did start up an instance but haven’t done much. Ran into a lot of federation issues which I know are common.

Yeah I use the free plan of cloud flare to make the things I need accessible away from home

From what I was told. If you self host for only yourself, there is no benefit and you are not talking the load off anyone else’s instances. I believe because you still need to pull all that data so no difference. But if you have a few people on your instance then that will help The more you have.

Self host on an old desktop I turned into a headless Linux server. So no cost unless you factor in wattage but my servers already running a number of other applications. Oh and I guess my domain but I was also using that already.

I recently setup one up and it wasn’t difficult.

Biggest issue for me was user error where I didn’t think about needing an smtp service to send emails. So just got a free one that allows 300/day