I did it, but my buddy has a server with extra resources that he doesn't care if I use and I already owned domains.

Say $20/yr for domain, Lemmy needs around 150MB of RAM and almost no CPU. You could easily do that for $5/mo. Slice up the domain renewal, call it $8.

So far, there are upsides and downsides.

The upsides, I can federate with anyone I want and it's unlikely that they'll defederate with me because I'm one guy, and maybe a handful of friends if they want accounts. Two, I wanted something I could use as a blog anyway, so I made a mod only community on my instance where I can blog. I don't care if people read it or not, it just seemed fun.

Downside, finding communities is relatively more laborious. I have to go to other instances and look at their communities, or all feeds, to find things to subscribe to at home. Which means for each one, I need to copy the link or name, go to my instance's search, then go to the communities tab and subscribe. On a big instance, someone probably already searched for a lot of communities at least once, which is enough to index it. But on your own, you gotta do it yourself and it can get a little tedious.

Overall, I'm liking running my own though, so I plan to keep doing that.