Back in November, I was looking at what it would take to buy a hosting solution from a company that would spin 'em up. https://masto.host/pricing/ https://mast

Back in November, I was looking at what it would take to buy a hosting solution from a company that would spin 'em up. https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/ Note the 'federation capacity' which is described further down. If you are federating to many sites (because your users are following many users across different sites), that can get expensive in terms of time/network/cpu. Even if you are self hosting, it is most efficient if your users tend to follow other users at a limited number of other sites so that the processing threads don't get too congested. Furthermore, if something on your instance goes viral and everyone starts boosting it and following your sites users it can significantly impact the performance. If you are expecting to be making connections to tens of thousands of instances, the cost of an instance for that network / cpu load is going to be significantly higher than the average person can support / administer / host. This gets to a bit of a paradox - the more you want to distribute and federate, the more expensive it is to stand up an instance and the more market forces will encourage users to go to the central hosts.