Slowly exploring the lemmy ecosystem, since I don’t want to use reddit, and was wondering if selfhosting would be a good idea?
Not the OP, but can you move your account to a private instance or is it not possible at the moment?
Not yet, that’s (open) issue #1985: Moving user profile to a new instance.
The devs also explicitly mentioned this request in their statement:
we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won’t have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.
For now, you can create another account on another instance and use that instead (or both), or just peek how the experience might be.