I think the climate might be more favorable today. People are starting to realize that walled gardens have serious drawbacks, so there's more interest in decent

I think the climate might be more favorable today. People are starting to realize that walled gardens have serious drawbacks, so there's more interest in decentralized solutions. Conversely, hosting has become much cheaper and easier than before. You can spin up a DigitalOcean droplet for 5 bucks, get a Let's Encrypt cert, and spin up a Mastodon Docker image in an hour or so. The barrier to running an instance is very low nowadays.