There's a gigantic flood of new users (i.e. literally multiplying the userbase) in the past few weeks, so yeah, a lot of servers are restricting signups to cope

There's a gigantic flood of new users (i.e. literally multiplying the userbase) in the past few weeks, so yeah, a lot of servers are restricting signups to cope. I don't think "begging for donations" needs to scale, if instances get too large to keep running then smaller instances should (and do) split off, they can still talk to each other after all. There's an actively maintained public instance list here: https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers