Meta introductory post: over the weekend I switched to the largest Mastodon instance because I wanted more accurate Like counts. Like counts are not federated in Mastodon by design (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11339#issuecomment-518029618). The net result is that instances with vastly more users show more accurate like counts than instances with few users. I’m still happily paying for phpc.social because it’s an important community resource.