I like the fact that mastodon.social is the biggest instance, but I would leave for an instance that is paid only, say $10/month, has a cool domain name, and thus can afford to raise the rate limits.

Mastodon.social feels like early Twitter both culturally (good), and fail-whale-wise (not good).

@gruber

I'm working with some people who trying to set up an instance which is a member-owned co-op. A bit of spreadsheeting suggests that for a large-ish instance you could run just fine on $5/month.

@timbray @gruber I’ve been hoping that within another few months, membership organizations that already run some technical resources (like email boxes or forwarding) would add "Mastodon instance" to their package. I expect only a small %age of members would want it, but it would a great tool to encourage sign-ups if run professionally.
@glennf @timbray @gruber I’d love it if a company like @fastmail offered Mastodon hosting. They’ve had my email business for more than a decade, and this feels like a natural extension for them.
@seibert @glennf @timbray @fastmail Something akin to Fastmail is exactly what I'm thinking. If it were actually run by Fastmail, all the better.
@glennf lol I left this thread hours ago with this same idea in my head
@glennf @gruber @seibert @timbray @fastmail I’ve been paying to support xoxo.zone for this reason.
@glennf @gruber @seibert @timbray @fastmail offering their own Mastodon server would push me over the edge to finally start using Fastmail.