mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

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All of this led to me ditching all of those (except YouTube, this is without a real alternative due to the content exclusively hosted there) and starting to self-host my stuff and joining the Fediverse.

To have some sort of viable fediverse alternative to YouTube, the developers of it would have to abandon some of the free software principles that current fediverse platforms uphold. There needs to be a way to monetize to attract creators and get people to host the servers

Free in software should stand for freedom, not money. We need better ways for financing such software projects and creators making content on them.

J Lou

Yeah free as in freedom not as in price.

The closest anyone's come to a mechanism that would allow efficient financing of public goods like free software is quadratic funding. Unfortunately, there are unsolved issues with collusion and identity verification