I’d like to be the owner of my own data. I don’t know if my data at kbin.social is available for download or something.
Not unless you plan on blocking federation entirely. Once your data goes out to the Fediverse it’s there forever.
The data instance really has is your browser info, IP and clicks. Posts are on all federated instances. That’s for every site out there, and kbin doesn’t have (I hope) business to sell this data to anyone.
If you already have a VPS, or are already hosting services locally in your home, you should spin up and instance for no other reason than to intuit the edge cases for the space. It’s super informative.
It’s just a little bit of a pain to get set up if you’re not already familiar with the bits and bobs needed to do it.