I understand the sentiment behind the entire donate to poast meme thing but it feels more like peer pressure than anything to donate to your instance admin now I don't like that

This server is not very expensive to run it's only like 10 bucks a month, so we don't really need donations or anything. So instead if you have 5 bucks a month to dedicate to fedi, why not start your own instance? It's a liberating and fun experience to do so. If you don't like the Pleroma DB rot problems, there are always other smaller and more portable options such as snac2 [ https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 ] they will likely last longer [in terms of instance lifespan at least] than most other softwares out there and they also have cool devs behind them.

If you're concerned about where to find a vps to start an instance, there are a few providers out there which offer kvm slices for dirt cheap, I used to use a $5 vultr vps to run my first single user instance. It was pretty fun. Though I've heard vultr has shit the bed nowadays. So it's really your call. I've heard crunchbits is pretty good nowadays.

I guess the only thing really stopping people from doing this is the amount of tech savvyness you need for something like that, but graf himself has funded projects like fediverse express, which handles the techy part for you apparently. Though software options are obviously limited with it.

We'll always need more instances, so start yer own!!!