I've been playing around using masto.host to run my own instance. It's fully provisioned, and takes care of all the upgrades. The cheapest plan is 6 bucks a month, which isn't really that crazy. I was already pitching in a couple of bucks for the instance I was using, so it wasn't really a big difference in terms of cost.
I've run it for a week so far without any problems, and it seems to be working as well as the instance I was using before. Big advantage is that I have full control over which servers and accounts I federate with.
The one thing I didn't realize is how much data mastodon servers go through. My instance chewed through the 20 gig limit in just a couple of days initially. Then I set media retention policy to a day and now it peaks at around 15 gigs.
I'd be curious to hear if anybody else decided to run their own instance and their experience with that. Are there any downsides that are not obvious here?
I think with a self-hosted mastodon instance, the main downside is poorer discovery across the fediverse as a whole.
When you scale up to the thousands of users something like mastodon.social has, it's not really an issue because other users have already established connections between instances by following or replying... but if your instance only has a single user, you only see and share posts with the instances you've directly interacted with, and it can be really isolating. You have to already know what external accounts you want to follow, because your instance is initially blind to them.
I feel like more instance connections leads to way larger amounts of data consumption too. I follow 120, and am followed by 12... my instance is currently using 24.1 GB for Media Storage.
Yeah that makes sense, in my case I was a already following a lot of accounts and had a lot of followers, so discoverability wasn't an issue. I can see how it's a problem if you're making a new account though. In that case, it's better to just join a bigger instance so you can find content.