Comment by abdullahkhalids
13 hours ago
Why would you include the money required to pay shareholders, pay the humongous parts of the company doing ad tech, the lobbying money, the fine money, etc. What is the cost of running a social media site?
I have previously calculated that Mastodon costs including development are on the order of 1 EUR/person/year [1]. Even if you 10x it, it's nothing. Facebook does nothing more technically complicated than the forums of the 90s. It's just smarter design.
I am not. I am explicitly saying to offset revenue from ads. That's a different question. Best of luck getting Facebook-level distribution in your 1 EUR Mastodon.
There are no technical reasons preventing the Mastodon federated network from scaling to billions of users. An individual server might not be able to scale to even 10 million users, but that is by design. There should be thousands or better tens of thousands of servers each supporting a small number of users, with moderation handled at the server level.