I’ve been running my own single user instance since I think 2021 (I think I have 4 active users now). It’s worked out very well for me.

The key thing that I found was I had to go out and find people to add. There are existing lists of people, and I also lucked out that at the same time I joined the fediverse, one comedian I like happened to open up an instance which brought a whole bunch of users who were on my level, and once that started then I was able to add all kinds of people from all kinds of different instances.

It was much more upfront work, but eventually my feed was a whole lot of fun and you don’t need to follow many people to have a feed too fast to even follow