File transfer costs on a typical provider will absolutely eat away at any money you could save through CPU or memory efficiency gains, I think. If you move to a

File transfer costs on a typical provider will absolutely eat away at any money you could save through CPU or memory efficiency gains, I think. If you move to a different provider (like others have mentioned) to fix this then you'll often get good CPU and memory to go with it so the whole calculus changes. Those two resources are often the cheapest in the whole stack, for better and worse. You'll save $20 by using a smaller droplet but still pay $80 for outgoing traffic and another $30 for disk storage, and those are the costs that increase the fastest. The design of the existing Fediverse means that they just use a lot of bandwidth and storage. I think it would be a wash at the end of the day.