I don't like wading into Meta Discourse but since it is clogging my TL right now: if you want people to spread out better over the Fediverse etc etc, tooting that people shouldn't join Masto dot social is not very useful in isolation. Tell people where you think people SHOULD go instead, and not just "a smaller instance", share specific recommendations of "if you're interested in X, go to Y.Z" that will help people point their friends in the right direction!
FWIW I still run @ExilianOfficial's account from mastodon.social: I'm sure it's not the best place for it, but I have asked publicly until blue in the face where it would be good to move it to, and really haven't had anyone provide answers (obviously that's an unusually difficult case because a lot of servers ban or are hostile to organisations' accounts, but even so, it is not easy to get good information on the options).
(I'd still like ideas on this if anyone has any).
@JubalBarca should like scholar.social or hackers.town could be a good fit for
@ExilianOfficial@mastodon.social
@JubalBarca maybe through masto.host?
@maloki That'd be a possibility if our income/donations increase: annoyingly what we pay for our webforum hosting has just gone up, and we've got some other cool but not cheap (by our limited budget standards) plans for the coming months. I'll keep it in mind though and mention it as a possibility to our treasurer next time we chat :)
@maloki I'm pretty sure scholar has a policy against institutional accounts which it would fall under (and Exilian's sort of borderline scholarly, I kind of think of us as "creatives but oft collaborating with scholars"). Not sure about Hackers-Town, will check.
The ideal solution really I guess would be for Exilian to run its own instance, but I don't know that any of us involved in it have the spoons or time (and I'm not sure about the tech capability) to take that on at least at the moment.