I created my twitter account when sending tweet via text was still a thing. Never really used it, so I'm not the right demographic.

But I do think your approach is the right one. I hope you succeed a breaking even and generate a margin for your time.

Thank you for your kind words. If Twitter/Mastodon is not what you need, perhaps I could interest you in my hosted XMPP and Matrix offerings?

I’m self hosting those, thanks. I did notice your offering in the prices.

Maybe you could benefit from clearer price ? For instance not mixing group prices with prices for single accounts?

Idk I suck at that, but I know all those services pretty well and I was having difficulty to follow prices.

That page (like many others) do need a lot of UX love. Pretty soon I hope to be launching managed instance hosting (i.e, people that want to have their own instance, under their own domain) and I'm already scratching my head at how to present two complete different classes of products on the same page.

Figuring out these small issues is hard, it gets even harder when I am promising that I am not doing any type of user tracking or analytics. I just saw a message on the support site about someone who wanted to make a deposit, but reported "on mobile, the button is grayed out". Turns out that on mobile there is no cursor to indicate that the user needs to select the payment method first. So, technically not broken, but functionally this issue could've cost me hundreds of dollars already?

Yah. Oh god am I confortable in my golden cage with a team of Ux people responsible for that …

Is there a way for me to export if I decide to self host later?

I don't have the time to set up a Mastodon server right now, but part of the appeal of Mastodon is having more control over my data.

Yes, you can export your data to any new server and you can even redirect your followers to your new identity. You´d only have trouble if the instance admin blocks your account before you get to do any of that, but for anything like that to happen you'd have to have done something truly egregious and/or your admin is one shitty, petty person.

Yes, you can export, and most servers will put up a helpful forward pointer once you move your account so people see where your new profile is. I haven't tried it but others who have seem to keep all their followers / following seamlessly.

Yes, there is a button to export all your data as csv.

Honestly, i think something better can be done around the Activitypub protocol than mastodon. And i'm not a social media guy, so i will wait until someting better is built.