i'm not sure how any of this is supposed to work or if as a user i am supposed to care.
i've budgeted next month to pay the maintainer of the thingy that i am thingy-ing and hopefully on a monthly basis. but is the end game for users to run their own instances ?
It's the same as hosting your own email server. Yes it's "best practice" to host your own, but there's updates, bug workarounds, certificates, etc etc that makes it easier to use someone else's server. In the end it's a personal choice.
Or use multiple accounts on different instances that represent your different interests. Like maybe you have a "news & shitposting" account, and another "programming and piracy" one, etc. And ensure each account is on an instance that supports the necessary federations to support that.
That's a pretty common mindset amongst small instance runners I think, including the one I'm on. Only caveat, this instance doesn't allow NSFW posting (viewing is fine), and has a pretty vague ban policy lmao