This was first brought up about a month ago and we agreed to see how Mastodon develops.
Some feedback - the acct has experienced good growth for the effort that was put in, but it seems like a much better suited environment than Twitter with its users interacting far more with the project. It's attracting the kind of people who'd be ideal for working with the apertus community certainly. The platform has been experiencing difficulties because the .social instance is overloaded. I'm more convinced that starting our own instance is a good idea than I was a month ago put it that way, but I'll continue to monitor/work things.
We're here - https://mastodon.social/@apertus
And reading on instances can be found here - https://medium.com/@Gargron/two-reasons-why-organizations-should-switch-to-self-hosting-social-media-9a1bbac45b69#.71hyoqwbu
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/docs/Running-Mastodon/Production-guide.md#running-in-production-without-docker