Chatting with a friend about #SocialMedia, #BigTech and #privacy (someone sceptic of the #fediverse, alternative apps or services, and ways to monetise other than #surveillance, who downplays or ignores the need to protect data and fight against #advertising).
He points out that even when the software itself is free, servers are very expensive (thus the need to either pay a lot for services or, more commonly, sell your data & consume ads). I suspect that's a feeble argument, so I looked up how “expensive” each active user is to #Twitter.
In 2019, Twitter had ~330M active users, and reported operating expenses of ~$3B. So if each active user paid a mere $10 per year for the service, Twitter could afford to never share your data, never show anybody a single ad, never tinker maliciously with trends or timelines, and still have a net profit margin of ~6%.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/financial-statements
@tripu servers aren't "very expensive". having hundreds of people on payroll is expensive. renting offices in fancy towns is expensive.
that's the beauty of federation, anyone who can spare a few dollars can run an instance for some people. if you have more people, limit registration or upgrade the server. imho the hardest thing is to find the time for maintenance, not the money to rent a server.