So far I'm absolutely loving Mastodon! It it everything I looked to get rid of in Facebook/Twitter etc... The only thing that bothers me is there are too many people with anime profile pics and japanese nicknames posting furry/loli/borderline pedo content.
@biomedmax I use filters to block keywords and (since I run my own server) I block federation with servers that are clearly dedicated to stuff I don't want in my life. Works well so far.
@biomedmax I run a small Joyent Triton Datacenter cluster (3 machines) that I've had for years, so it's hard to break out the costs of the one VM for Mastodon. :) But in general, it would probably cost $20/month if you used a VPS.
I pay more than average to my ISP ($135/month) because I'm remote (it's dedicated terrestrial wireless) and I have a /29 subnet of public addresses.
Domains are cheap - like $9.99 a year in some cases.