Great! And this provider will just... eat the server, bandwidth, and storage costs, indefinitely, with no expectation of financial renumeration? Or will they charge a minimal fee that few social media users will be willing to pay?

My point stands: Hosting a full Bluesky stack is big money, every month. And that ignores how the admin must be seen in a positive light; having deep pockets isn't enough, the admin team running (and paying for) the servers must be trusted not to manipulate what gets seen, who gets banned, and what links are deemed malicious.

$150/month is a lot of money, but split just 100 ways, that's $1.50/month. If the user base is too expensive, emotionally, to do free server administration for, well, why would you want to do that job then at all? Which speaks volumes.

It's the payment onboarding that's usually the sticking point (which is fortunate for my side of the discussion, because you've missed a zero), but that also misses that hosting costs will almost certainly scale with user-count.

And I'm not discussing emotionally-heavy, but public standing within the community you've convinced to trust you with their social media algorithm

The figure is from the [0] of the comment upthread that pointed to https://lobste.rs/s/gsj2e2/how_self_host_all_bluesky_except_...

In your view, contrary to the lobster.rs post, running the server should instead cost $1,500/month and goes up exponentially to support a handful of users. Have I got you right?

How is having a good public standing to a very vocal minority about modern day sensitive topics not a high emotional cost to bear?

And that provider will be squeezed by the PE firms and/or will also attempt to squeeze users for its own benefit.