I think people tend to wildly overestimate how expensive hosting a large dataset has to be, because of cloud.
If you only need a few terabytes, you can rent from Hetzner for more like <$20/month. Maybe <$10 at this point, if you are patient. And you can use the server for other things too, since it's a fixed cost, like your website or encrypted backups or other files you host. I spent a while figuring this out before I decided to do Danbooru20xx, to make sure it was very cheap. Given how my website has grown in size, and how absurdly exorbitant cloud bandwidth and object/hard drive space is, the Danbooru dataset was practically free at the margin!
> Also, I thought these lesswrong folks were all about "effective altruism" and "earning to give" and that stuff.
Some people are, some people aren't. I'm not. (I have intellectual sympathy with EA, but not emotional.)
