Founder of ZeroTier, Inc. - Lives in Cinncinnati, OH, USA
I noticed the same thing about Mastodon vs Twitter. When I visited Twitter I would come away angry. (This was true both pre and post Elon.) When I visited Mastodon I would come away happier and with some interesting ideas. The tone is totally different. I chalk it up to the absence of engagement-maximizing algorithms, which tend to select for toxicity because that’s what gets people to spend the most time on the site.
Anyone looking to host something big should check out bare metal hosting like Datapacket, Reliablesite, FDCServers, etc. Down side is total lack of handholding and other cloud features and the fact that you can’t scale up without redeploying on a new box, but the upside is ridiculously cheap bandwidth. The bandwidth cost is by size of pipe, not gigabyte transferred, and pipes upwards of 10gbps are affordable.
OVH and Hetzner are also worth looking at but aren’t quite as cheap bandwidth-wise.
The owner of a centralized platform always has total control of it. Anything else is an illusion.