The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience.
Scores are federated, resulting in a consistent global feed across instances and a lack of uniqueness for each instance. I wish hosting an instance provided a more customized experience like this. It would be a great incentive.
It’s pretty much what I’m doing, and it’s not so hard. Pick the top 10 instances, subscribe to the communities with interesting stuff.
I think this should be the default user experience actually. Just being given a list of popular communities both on the same instance and on other instances, as part of the sign-up.
Once the stupid meta threads launches, it will be very good at being super user friendly. And this is where open source products sometimes fails. It’s hard and time consulting to make something as simple as it can be.