documentation

so, would you mind showing any non-FANG, but write heavy site? Besides that, even the operation of most social networks should be very easy to be split into town-sized instances with batch-updates in-between instances (see mastodon specs https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Runni...). What actually costs a lot is constantly surveilling all user interactions, data-warehousing that and playing out ads. None of which is necessary, and a 20ct/per user/per month should cover the actual service nicely...

Most Mastodon instances cover bills with a handful of supporters on Patreon. Centralizing is what racks up the big dollar figures. Even mastodon.social only cost about $280/month to run as of mid 2018. https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Runni... It's not necessary for everyone to pay if the topology is right. They could have joined the growing ActivityPub fediverse and set up a managed hosting thing the way one of the major Mastodon contributors did. The centralized sites spend much of their money on marketing and making ad deals. You don't need that if the social network is a standard feature you bolt your software on to and don't depend on ads.

"This repository has been archived by the owner. It is now read-only." (https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Runni...) So where is it?

You and me both (however I still have a FB account for some reason). I keep on hearing about Mastadon but haven't dabbled. I have access to quite a lot of hardware and internets ... right ... deploy VM and let's have a play. https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation#running-mastodon