@Edent
This perfectly encapsulates my experience on the Fedi: I started out on a hosted instance, and as I learned more about how instances work I moved to a host in my home country, where I found and connected with people on a more local level. Then the techy in me got interested in running my own instance (I used to SysOp my own BBS in the ‘90s), but the demands—both financial and technical—proved to be too much of a headache so I moved to a managed self-hosting provider, which I eventually outgrew and I finally ended up on the instance where I began my journey.
The true power in decentralized solutions like Mastodon and the Fediverse is that people are free to choose their own path without being locked-in to a particular provider.