I haven’t yet, but eventually I plan to host my own and just sub to other instances from there, specifically because I trust myself more than other mods. And I think that’s a big goal of federation—if you want, you can just* run your own instance and you shouldn’t miss out on anything because of it.

*It can still be quite difficult to set up instances, depending on what software you want to use. I hope this will improve dramatically over the next year or two, so non-IT-professionals can participate in the network.

So from my understanding at least for kbin is that the software is open source and for kbin.social, ernest is paying for the server to run this instance and he is planning to get someone to help with the server while he works on the administration side. There are other instances run by other people and all the magazines seem to be backed up in one way or another in each instance so that if this instance dies, there is some parity? Not 100% sure on this last part so correct me if im wrong...

I have a personal Lemmy instance, and a personal Calckey instance. Still debating on creating a personal PixelFed instance, and maybe even a public kbin instance.

Anyone who wants to host a fediverse website owns the fediverse. It belongs to any of us and all of us.