That's not quite accurate. Parent comment was referring to self-hosting their own instance (as opposed to joining a hosted instance like mastodon.social, or wha

That's not quite accurate. Parent comment was referring to self-hosting their own instance (as opposed to joining a hosted instance like mastodon.social, or whatever). It costs nothing to join those, but some people like having their own node on the federated network. If you have a raspberry pi you can self-host pleroma and still follow mastodon users that you like. Mastodon is a bit resource intensive for a pi still, I believe.