But growth is never easy, nor is building a new home from nothing. And, even in my newness to this site, I would caution long time mastodonians to give us the space and time to figure out how to be our full selves without demanding we submit to norms (not rules) that limit who we can be and how we can make that present.
I promise you your site and your communities will be better off for it.
I can't help but notice many toots from helpful newbies encouraging you to support the Mastodon Patreon.
It's fine to do that but understand it goes to just two big instances and the official Mastodon dev team.
It does NOT trickle down to YOUR instance. If you want to support your server, donate to it directly. Nearly all the costs of the explosive growth of the past few weeks is borne by local instances.
Mastodon is decentralized. There is no Mastodon Inc. This is not Twitter.
UPDATE: no need for further boosting. Thank you everyone!
My boss, Matt Mullenweg, the boss of Automattic, owner of Tumblr, is looking for ex-Twitter employees for Tumblr, saying,
"we're putting on a fast track to see how they can help super-charge Tumblr. We can't absorb thousands of people, but I'd be open to hiring entire teams if they already work great together."
https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1593726621340426241
Our "work with us" page: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
If you're new, and even if you aren't, we have a precious thing here.
This is an ad-free platform that isn't designed to make money and doesn't use algorithms that promote provocative content in an attempt to boost "engagement."
But it's not free. It costs money to run, and sometimes the people who run the servers dig into their own pockets.
So please go to your server's "about" page (the link is there, somewhere) and make a donation. Make it a monthly one.
Thank you.