I like running my own too, and agree it’s a bit of a chore to get content.
I feel the biggest hurdle is finding communities. I wish the instance would automatically index communities from federated instances. I don’t mean track posts/comments, just keep a record of the communities existence.
Looking them up elsewhere, then searching locally, waiting for it to work, then subscribing is a bit of work and I’ve only bothered with about 10 so far.
You can save your sort preference in settings.