I don't have any figures, let's just 5 servers running containerized environments, with a couple of decent uplinks, it is feasible to handle bandwidth of a mill

I don't have any figures, let's just 5 servers running containerized environments, with a couple of decent uplinks, it is feasible to handle bandwidth of a million users for a few thousand a month. With a million users, it's feasible to support the site with donations... no funding or IPO's needed... In addition, there are numberous open-source frameworks ( like gnu-social etc. ) that enable a single person to deploy the code onto the servers.