If you’re checking out Mastodon the open source Twitter-like microblogging service, my first recommendation would be to pick a home server that isn’t the main mastodon-dot-social one.

There is a list of community servers. 
Figure out who runs different servers, what their model is to be sustainable across moderation & hosting, and what kind of people hang out there.

What do I mean? What could go wrong with many part-time server admins? Read @atomicthumbs thread for some examples. 
And yes, you should consider if #socialcoop is right for you. It’s my home server that I pay to be a co-op member of. Read more on the Social Co-op Wiki.

And of course, this is open source software. Consider supporting Mastodon on Patreon.

I know that @walkah recently setup a personal Pleroma server at walkah.social, which is an option if you’ve got a bit of a home lab.

My personal goal would be to see truly individual p2p microblogging flourish. The tools and protocols that we’re building at Fission are meant to help with that.

And we’ve got grand hopes from our friends at Bluesky, who are also dedicated to moving “from platforms to protocols”.

Finally, I help run a little twitter <> mastodon cross posting service called Moa Party. You can hook up your accounts on the app at moa.party and read more about the project at https://moaparty.com.

We’re looking for both volunteer maintainers as well as developers who are paid an honorarium to work on the Python codebase. I wrote a thread about moa with more info.