@sara I agree. I set one up and ran it for months. Great experience. There are two aspects of the Mastodon instance admin experience that need work IMO: 1) Upgrading to new versions (Mine blew up when I did an upgrade. Multiple core devs looked at it and were mystified. My instance went mute. All the pieces still worked. Something in the routing busted.) - and 2) Routing. You can run your own instance, but understanding how traffic flows and having the links with other busy 'hub' instances are important.