That’s illegal, unfortunately. Only qccredited investors can invest into private companies. There should be a lower limit on that rule, say $100 or something, so naive investors could invest play sums in potentially shady stuff. But there isn’t, so you can’t.

I think it theoretically can’t be done. The protocol allows anyone to query for posts, and it has to work that way unless you want to move ActivityPub federation to an invite-only system. On most servers I think browsing while being logged out is sufficient, just like on pre-Musk Twitter.

Mastodon also doesn’t let you prevent people from reading your posts.

Mounting solar panels on roofs - like all roof work - is dangerous.

Unfortunately not. For me the main problem is discoverability. There’s no recommendation algorithm except for boosts. I’m not suggesting Mastodon integrate some kind of machine learning or other advanced stuff, but number of likes from followed accounts and a threshold would be nice for a start. As it is, Mastodon is just bad for entertainment purposes. Maybe it works for other purposes, but for entertainment I’d rather have the algorithm-fuelled quote-tweet dunking on Twitter.

MySQL sucks, and almost everyone who willingly use it also sucks.