I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me.
You're right about federation issues, though that's more a limitation of the fediverse protocols and fediverse software that really needs fixing. Fediverse instances don't automatically fetch and show all replies to posts you see, even if it knows they exist, unless your server is already fetching other things from the server hosting those posts. So it's a little harder to see other people's replies, which contributes to the problem of 20 people replying with the same answers because they can't see that other people have already replied.
Large instances work around that because everyone's already talking to at least one account on that server.
I hope those limitations get fixed someday, but for now they're fundamental to the fediverse.
I very much agree with you in owning your identity on this sort of thing, but I wouldn't pay $7/mo in order to participate in any social network.
I have my own email domain, and I can host it myself, or have someone else host it for me, on shared infrastructure. Fastmail charges me ~$4/mo, and that's for email, something anyone on the internet requires in order to interact with online services. I think $4/mo for a communications necessity is reasonable, and there are cheaper (even free) providers if I wanted to go that route. $7/mo for a social network is nuts.
I'm not sure how services like togethr.party work, but is it safe to assume that they have to spin up a completely new copy of the server software for each domain? That seems like a big problem, and is probably why this is so expensive.
I recently set up my own Matrix instance (using Synapse) and found it to be pretty wasteful, resource-wise. This is a solved problem with email servers, where one server can host as many domains as you have storage and processing power for; not sure why the chat/social platforms haven't caught up architecture-wise.
Personally, I think Bluesky is a mix of NIH with a dash of wanting to be a central point of control, that is doomed in the long run - anything that works well for Bluesky can be copied, but the real benefit for the Fediverse in the long run is that Mastodon is just one of many services, or types of services. Every new service gets to hook into an existing network instead of starting from scratch.
I don't believe ATProto has the same issues, and I believe it would take quite a rearchitecture of ActivityPub to solve.
> such that you can import it into a different service later
This is the key issue. There is no way to import posts in Mastodon without manually fudging the database (which I also had to do when running my own instance). As another commenter mentioned, it's a tricky issue, in large part because it's not part of the federation protocol.
Bluesky solves this by separating the storage from the other parts of the distributed system, such that you don't need to move your storage to change your identity, hosting, moderation, etc. Keeping them independent is a smart move.
I host my instance on an always free VM, don't put much work toward maintenence, and haven't had a problem with federation. Post migration is not really a thing from a shared instance, I don't think, so yeah, that sucks.
Honestly, the most expensive part for me is the domain, because I shelled out for a spiffy premium domain. But I'm weird.