What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?
I liked the community that had built up and wanted to help that continue.
Well, in a system like I’m talking about, adding your server and storage space in the mix would make the whole thing more reliable and add to the storage capacity so more content can be hosted/backed up, just like paying for a second server to host a website allows to store more stuff and to start creating backups. You would still help build the community (the website), you just wouldn’t have an administrative role outside of the communities you would want to moderate.