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 Balkan
Justin Thomas 🛡