I was formerly on mastodon.cloud, and I was tipping the admin on Patreon. I didn't use Mastodon too much, but recently found that my instance was almost always down, and running a very old version of Mastodon compared to everyone else. So I decided to move.<p>After looking through the list of popular instances for a bit, perusing some of their rules, worrying about whether I ended up on one of the servers with an aggressive server block list (where I might not be able to talk to everyone, because those servers are viewed as bad), or one of the servers who is on everyone else's block lists (because "free speech zones" are considered bad by the former group), I went ahead and signed up on mastodon.social.<p>As important as the federated aspect is to me, with the lack of a full profile migration option, moving is painful, and I don't want to risk getting another instance that goes dead. If the developer of the software stops maintaining his, then the whole system is pretty much dead, so it's a safe bet.