HorseFD

You could try using a tool like LCS to flesh out your instance a bit by automatically subscribing to popular communities.

Memmy is really good. The TestFlight is full but it’s about to get released on the App Store

wefwef is a web app and it’s also really good. You can install it to your home screen and you’d never know it wasn’t a native app.

Mlem has potential but so far it’s got a bit of work to do to catch up to the above two.

That’s interesting, they’re two of my biggest interests. I wonder if this is true for a lot of other people.

About $5-$10 per month. I’m using an ARM64 system which make it even cheaper.

I’m hosting my own because it’s fun and it’s cheap to do it. I imagine it could get expensive to host bigger instances, and at that point the admins would likely look to donations to keep things going.