Indeed. Ask anyone running the general discussion group for a small town. The difficulty of effective, fair, and efficient moderation cannot be overstated.

Ask anyone running a general discussion group for a neighborhood. It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation. Most people eventually quit if they're not being compensated in some significant way.

On the other hand, if anything goes it can probably be fairly hands off.

> It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation

And yet some Reddit mods manage subs with 10s of thousands for… free.

If you want to work for free, Reddit will gladly accommodate.

But they also have thousands of very well paid employees. Average salary $150K+.

Indeed they do. And on that team is a massive number of salespeople who are constantly farming the world for advertising dollars and a large team of machine learning engineers helping to ease the burden of moderation.

I've run an online community since 2001 and I've yet to meet the boogeymen of self-hosting. A small site and forum with ~100 users doesn't cost a shit to run ($5 per month, the cost of a coke and a sandwich where I live), updates itself automatically via CPanel, and it isn't much of an issue if it goes down for an hour or two every other year. That's an acceptable cost for not having to submit to anyone's whims about allowed content, and for not having to tolerate "redesigns". Twitter is probably down more than a standard Apache server.

The small community can make its own rules. I’ve seen Mastodon instances with both stricter and less strict rules than Twitter. And it’s fine because people can just spin up a new instance if they don’t like it.

Where are you hosting that still offers CPanel on a $5/month plan?