I've been running my own email server for myself and a dozen or so friends since 1998. It hasn't been a problem. I had to evolve it over time and set up DKIM an

I've been running my own email server for myself and a dozen or so friends since 1998. It hasn't been a problem. I had to evolve it over time and set up DKIM and DMARC. Spamassassin, greylisting, etc have helped me cut down on my incoming spam. It hasn't been a ton of work, maybe a day or two a year to deal with a new version of whatever that needs to some config changes. I've been running my own mastodon instance for me and a few friends as well. It's been fine, we federate fine, no bans that I know of, no reports about my users. I think more smaller instances is probably better for the health of the network than a few huge instances. Especially if those instances are free to users. Large instances need more moderation than a couple of admins can handle, I am concerned that instances like msdn.social or whatever may not be sustainable from both a 'actual costs' standpoint (bandwidth, hardware, etc) but also from a moderation standpoint. In terms of my instance, the costs are very low, the mastodon software itself is frankly kind of painful to maintain, it's designed to run in a way that is scalable but that makes it a bit too complicated for a smaller instance.. I hope we see some more interesting experiments in moderation, tools like spamassassin for mastodon to automatically score and flag local posts for moderation review. It's early days. I think we may just end up with what we see in email like the blackhole list. Have an instance full of nazis you refuse to moderate, your instance ends up on the list and everyone who subscribes to it will just defederate automatically.