When I want to have back and forth between people on a regular basis, I choose chat apps. Mastodon feels like it’s trying to be a poorly designed chat app.

I do worry that they’ll run out of money before they can do the work to let the ecosystem become sustainable by itself.

I’m mildly concerned about this as well.

You don’t need to access information via the relay. You can have a client get information directly from PDSes or Appviews that don’t get their information from the relay.