The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience.
Scores are federated, resulting in a consistent global feed across instances and a lack of uniqueness for each instance. I wish hosting an instance provided a more customized experience like this. It would be a great incentive.
For micro/personal server runners, I also built a tool to automatically discover and add communities to your local instance :)
https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
EDIT: For support requests, I’ve created https://lemmy.world/c/lsbsupport as well.