I know that there's been intermittent stability issues with mastodon.social and mastodon.online recently. We're working on improving our infrastructure to address this.
I wish you luck, but...
If I got to pick a solution approach to donate money towards supporting, I think it would be a rebalancing tool to help people migrate away from overloaded (or otherwise unstable) servers... (#CSB)
New idea of OSS problem (apart from the financial model): In theory, anyone can modify the code, but in practice, it's dangerous to modify old code. Doesn't matter much if it's by a better or worse programmer, or even if it's your own old code.