Our pay-what-you-can cooperative Mastodon instance at social.coop, running strong for over 5 years, is currently debating what to do with our 10,000€ budget surplus.
The idea that social media costs more to operate than people would be willing to pay is false. It's propaganda from the people who profit from keeping you trapped in their closed networks to monetize your attention.
Well, it was true decade, maybe two ago. Stuff got faster and therefore cheaper too.
Server written in reasonably fast software on $10 (well, probably some extra bux in storage if community is image-heavy) VPS can reasonably serve tens of thousands of users in typical forum/blog/hn-esque format. Mastodon isn't but I don't doubt someone would rewrite it in something faster if there was a need for it.
