Coming of age in the late 90s/early 00s we had plenty of forums to choose from, hosted by hobbyists, with nary a monetization scheme in sight. And this was in the era when the tech was far less accessible and the hardware far more expensive. Sure, maybe a modern $5/month VPS running basic forum software isn't going to handle 100,000,000 active users, but it sure will handle 10,000 active users, and that's more than enough to have a healthy community.

(Note: I'm of the opinion that fediverse-style federation in the context of forums is merely a nice-to-have; the web is already naturally federated, and people should not feel bad if they want to save money/tech complexity/administration complexity by settling for ordinary self-hosted forums.)

You are off by 2 orders of magnitude. Plans for 10k active users on managed instance generally seems to be in the range of $250-450[1][2].

[1]: https://toot.io/pricing.html

[2]: https://masto.host/pricing/

This is specifically why I call out the federated model as a nice-to-have, not a requirement. ActivityPub is way, way more demanding of CPU and transfer than a simple forum, and as a result it's extremely difficult to self-host at scale. You can easily service 10,000 daily active users on a VPS serving lean, statically-rendered forum pages.

Mastodon was not designed to be cheap to host

> Mastodon was not designed to be cheap to host

Is there a reason for this, though? Need to be able to iterate on features quickly? Maybe not being able to tackle various complexities with the total available resources? Or maybe federation is just inherently expensive?

Why couldn't we have an alternative written in a more performant language/runtime with maybe things like lower quality images/videos or something?

> Is there a reason for this, though?

Because performance was not a concern when it was designed - or it could be that it was designed for small communities, and therefore not possible to scale-up cheaply. One of the problem is the caching of pictures from the different instances connected (if I remember correctly) which makes the data storage requirements go up very fast

The big issue with hosting forums and the like is trying to keep the bots at bay. I have seen very small forums get over run in next to no time. And putting in bot checks leads to frustration with the users.

Good point, my implicit assumption is that, unlike the classic forums of my youth, forums in the post-LLM age will want to adopt the "tree of invites" model (e.g. how lobste.rs does it) rather than allowing unrestricted write privileges (read privileges can still be public). This creates a localized web of trust that will be mostly manageable at medium scales; ban or revoke invite privileges to any users whose invitees turn out to be bots or sockpuppets.

I pay $10 a month to my masto instance. They do a superb job.

Is that the best way? No clue. But I'm glad to chip in.

That's up for each instance to decide. Could be subscription, donation, I can't see why there couldn't be local (non federated) advertising