This stuff is never free anywhere but the scale of Big Tech insulates you from it somewhat.
I actually think it’s good to be reminded that our ability to communicate comes with a cost – in terms of resources, environmental impact, etc., not just money.
But, equally, it also makes the case that a system optimised to host hundreds of thousands of people on a single instance is not also somehow magically optimised to host just one person.
The latter is the problem I’m exploring with #SmallWeb.