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What happens when you have your own Mastodon instance (just for you) where over 21,000 people follow you and when you’re following over 4,300 people?
You end up paying ~€50/month for Mastodon hosting 
It also opens up interesting questions: what happens when a popular account joins your instance (hint: it will probably cost the instance maintainers quite a bit… I don’t envy the mastodon.nu folks right now).
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.
@aral Big Tech did not insulate us from paying for services, they used our personal data to pay for it. Big Tech also made it so that nobody needed fiber optics because they did all the processing.