Is it just up-front cost? I understand that for larger instances because they’d have to setup heftier systems, but even micro-instances seem to rent cloud compute when they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.
Edit: I understand that self-hosting is a skill that takes years to learn, and I’m aware that the vast majority of people on Earth choose to spend their time and energy investing into completely different topics. However, Lemmy tends to attract the techy type, so I suppose I just assumed the ratio of self-hosters-to-not would be higher. I’m not saying it’s trivial, just that I presume more Lemmings know how to do it than, say, Redditors (taking total users into account ofc)
Most people are answering the title question but is your question about why people use a VPS or paid server for a Lemmy instance instance of hosting at home?
Content is federated in. My home server is not a good place to keep unknown images, videos, and links to other content. The risks associated with hosting user content are the main reason for using a data centre instead of home hosting.
There are also other benefits like complete separation from my personal hosted services that are actually hosted from home, and privacy and security reasons. As an example, my home hosted services are not available from outside my country, which virtually eliminates the malicious vulnerability scanning bots that constantly hit the domain before I added that limitation. But you can’t have that limitation for a federated service or it wouldn’t be able to federate. I have this country restriction on my router as part of the port forwarding rules.
But mostly it’s that first thing about the user generated content.
Is the legal liability actually different? Wouldn’t you still be equally responsible for what’s on your VPS, since you control it?