The main mastodon servers are struggling under the weight of the #TwitterMigration
If you've got an unused #RaspberryPi and a free hour, consider using @yunohost to set up your own personal instance. You'll be shocked how easy it is.
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Personal servers are a bad idea... they arent efficient when it comes to federations, your voice doesnt go very far because of how federation works (you wontt show in very many federated feeds), and a great many servers will block you on sight as they do many of the one-person instances.
Better off just picking a server that is well funded enough to have tthe processing power to handle it. QOTO has been running perfectly fine witth plenty of resources to spare despite getting a decent portion of the influx.
While there are a handful of extremist instances that block qoto its true, we have onne of the lowest insularity rates of most servers last I checked. As in we have one of the biggest reaches and federation footprints out there.
One of the reasons we can have this conversation is largely because our footprint is as large as it is we see many single-user images (we have crawlers that go out and find them and federate).
I agree its stupid and wrong that server instances will often block single useer instances, but sadly its just the truth of the matter.
The bigger issues are the ones you didnt respond to.. 1) its very inefficient for the network and 2) they have much smaller federation footprints due to the nature of how federation works
My load right now on a bigger server is little different than the load created by accessing it as a user of that server. In fact, it's probably slightly less of a burden, because my only has to download messages once and it can do that outside of peak load time.
With regard to the reach of a posts I make, they still get propagated by interactions. The original post you're responding to has been boosted on over 20 instances; that's more than one instance per follower of mine.
I have quite a solid network, which admittedly I've had to put a little more effort into bootstrapping, but it's self propagating as long as I'm interacting with people.
If instance admins want to defederate with me for running on a single user instance, that's their prerogative, I can still reach most of the network. If other people want to contact me, but their admins won't let them, self hosting is the cheapest way out of that walled garden.