I was on Mastodon for more than a year and loved it: great conversation that reminded me of the hope and promise of the Internet in the late 90's. Then my instance admin went AWOL, the site crashed, and all of my data and social graph were lost. I still can't get the admin to respond to emails. I could host my own server but who really has the technical know-how and time to do that kind of work? Mastodon has got to solve the reliability and/or portability problem. If I could have recovered my social graph on another instance, I would still be on the network.
Edit: I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.
That's of course the downside of a federated internet model run by many individual administrators. Nowadays, there are very large instances that are funded, and are very unlikely to just up and disappear. Also, running your own instance is actually not that hard nowadays. Digital Ocean has a provisioned option where it's a one click set up.
And I think these improvements show that community run services like this do listen to the users, and evolve to make them more user friendly over time.
Edit: I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.