FWIW, you don't need to join questionable communities to have your content on mastodon, e.g. Wordpress blogs can meaningfully participate on activitypub (people con repost, like, reply) so that may be an alternative for your friends, without the need to host a complex app, so long as they can get any Wordpress hosting. Discovery suffers tho.

Oh, thanks for the suggestion! I’ll tell them that’s an option – provided the hosting provider accepts the content too.