> I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me. I very much agree with you in owning your identity on this sort of thing, but

> I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me. I very much agree with you in owning your identity on this sort of thing, but I wouldn't pay $7/mo in order to participate in any social network. I have my own email domain, and I can host it myself, or have someone else host it for me, on shared infrastructure. Fastmail charges me ~$4/mo, and that's for email, something anyone on the internet requires in order to interact with online services. I think $4/mo for a communications necessity is reasonable, and there are cheaper (even free) providers if I wanted to go that route. $7/mo for a social network is nuts. I'm not sure how services like togethr.party work, but is it safe to assume that they have to spin up a completely new copy of the server software for each domain? That seems like a big problem, and is probably why this is so expensive. I recently set up my own Matrix instance (using Synapse) and found it to be pretty wasteful, resource-wise. This is a solved problem with email servers, where one server can host as many domains as you have storage and processing power for; not sure why the chat/social platforms haven't caught up architecture-wise.