@Heliograph @leonieke hi! I would recommend looking into self-hosting via GoToSocial... it's really powerful and features-rich.
I have my account on a basic Hetzner plan, installed via YunoHost. I keep hearing that self-hosting Mastodon is very resource intensive and not worth the hassle... whereas GoToSocial is lightweight and easy to maintain.
There is an independent tool available called SLURP that even allows you to move your posts from Mastodon to GoToSocial. @box464 and @joel have written superb blog posts about this process (sorry I don't have links ready).
Good luck!
P.S.: this is sent to you from my own GoToSocial account where I set character limit to 5000... aka 10x the limit of Mastodon. It's a wonderful wonderful feeling not having to break posts into multiple threads 🤗