Comment by mschuster91

> Sounds like you want to run your own private instance.

I'd like to do so, yes, but that exposes me to a (not insignificant) financial cost, (especially in Germany) a significant legal risk from CSAM/DMCA et al., and a significant amount of effort in maintenance.

Sure, there are "Mastodon as a service" providers that take at least the legal risk and maintenance off of me, but again, these cost even more money, and now I have the risk that the hoster is a fly-by-night operation that one day decides to close up shop for whatever reason.

And if anything happens to that private instance (say, the hoster disappears, the machine disappears without a backup, or the hoster undergoes an orderly shutdown), in the best case I still may have enough preparation to migrate the followers, but the old content is lost in any case. And that is bad.

In contrast with Bluesky and to a lesser degree Twitter, I can at least be reasonably sure that the provider does not vanish over night.