In the context of mastodon, an interesting question is, will the FBI pay the same amount, if anything? Will there be any legal “speed bumps” at all when it comes to overreach from the long arm of the law?

Presumably, a large company with high paid lawyers who are former FBI, like Twitter, Facebook, etc. would be able to pushback against quasi-constitutional requests. Clearly the FBI was able to get their way with Twitter, despite the big guns in the legal department.

Will they be paying mastodon “operators” (or whatever they’re called) the same amount?

I suspect they will not.

If an individual Mastodon instance reaches 100M users I’d expect them to be reimbursed for the thousands of FBI requests that generates.

It’s probably not worth the paperwork if you get one every three years.