When and how to raise money for a social networking site.

Mastodon is open source, so if you can get a coder to work on this (or learn to code yourself)

Make the charge very, very small. Maybe 5-10 cents.

Reward those who refer new authenticated accounts with say, 1 cent per referral. Referring accounts that are found to be bots will result in a charge against your balance, or ultimately banned from the platform. The income can be used to offset and improve the hosting costs.

Build new instances of your Mastodon variant.