Imagine that you have 48 hours to converse on a thread and grab its content, then it's gone. Third party software could archive if you wanted, but it wouldn't be an infrastructure requirement.
It'd be so much easier to serve that peer nodes could easily be stood up on residential / commodity hardware and could reasonably be expected to handle serving large portions of the discussion graph.
My biggest problem with social media is deleting history I do not want retained.
Many from such communities later migrated to Twitter, despite the board still operating. Wrestling virtue signaling game while earning buzz is easier for those with that background, and I still come across accounts on timeline with clear influence from there.
Massive upgrade from there to Twitter was forced individual consistency with account requirement - absolute anonymity leads to people without working theory of mind going gung-ho with total release from normally enforced multi-agent world modeling, and that's just malicious, like rejecting concept of criticism, possession, even nominatives.
I find Mastodon has a slower pace than corporate social media, and I like it that way. I want to browse posts when I have time for it. I have a crude patch running on my own server to backfill old posts from remote accounts when I scroll, which is very much the opposite idea.
I hate this suggestion, and I hope nothing like it becomes popular enough that I feel I must interact with it.
If you just want to run a single-user instance on the cheap: forget Mastodon! Takahe [0] does not require one whole server for each user and it has substantial lower TCO. A "small instance" for Mastodon can not be realistically be found for less than $10/month today , while I can offer Takahe for $39 per year [1].
But if you want to make the Fediverse really, really cheap to operate, lets rethink the whole server-centric approach and put some effort to develop applications that are primarily based on the client [2]
[1] https://communick.com/takahe
[2] https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi...
Also respects other people deleting their servers/media and prevents someone posting CSAM becoming a problem for everyone.
But there are systems where user is sovereign, defined by their key, not dependent on any masters. One such system is Nostr:
