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.
A program note for my fellow New York music weirdos: the indie movie theater Metrograph will be showing the new King Crimson documentary this Sunday at 6pm, followed by a screening of the Zappa documentary at 8pm including a q&a with director Alex Winter! (@alexwinter) See ya there!
This Twitter fiasco is a reminder of who is *actually* critical to the survival of our economy & society.
Twitter worked before the billionaire got here. Now that workers are gone, Twitter is collapsing. Workers made Twitter work—a billionaire broke it.
Workers > Billionaires
IGNITION by Kyrie Escala
Daphne
Chief TWiT 
Heather Buchanan
Jason Isaac
nixCraft 🐧
Qasim Rashid, Esq.
Frankie ✅
Seth Masket
Mike Knell