You can already donate to the people operating this instance. No subscriptions needed, just donate away.

Just because something’s not corporate owned doesn’t mean bad actors can come onto this platform. I’ve seen some unsavory people here already.

That’s because Mastodon is a federated Twitter clone. If you never used Twitter to begin with (which is really for professionals/celebrities/famous people to put out public messages to people), then you won’t get it. Most people don’t need to use Twitter or anything like it.

Yeah hopefully we get past the shitpost/meme stage which seems to be taking over here right now.

Isn’t it called BitTorrent?

Yeah but Reddit has 18 years of history and content behind it. So you will always find something worth reading. Here, I’m losing interest quickly. Memes are boring, I want to see some substantive discussion about something I don’t know anything about - something which Reddit and its userbase still excels at.

Well, bugs and UI aside, it seems like Lemmy can work but there’s not a lot of substantive discussion right now. The most upvoted stuff are memes and other low effort content. I’m not sure how long a bean meme can sustain serious activity.

I use Bing for Microsoft Rewards. You can get the equivalent of $10 a month in gift cards for your searches.