The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
What’s the point exactly of setting up your own instance? To post content to yourself?
Well, you might set up an instance for your own community if that community is not accepted elsewhere, or if you don’t like any of the other instances moderation policies, or you want to have control over exactly which instances you federate with.
But unless your instance then becomes a big instance none of that means anything. You’d just be shouting into the wind.