5+ years back Trumpettes threw around the label TDS at Trump detractors, saying they couldn’t see reality due to their rage…

Whatever you call it, however you see it, there is significant mass psychosis associated with our nutcase-in-chief.

For what it’s worth, I looked around and saw “ready to run” Mastodon hosting services starting at $6 per month, not too long ago. Tempting, but the service is the easy part, maintaining the community can be much more challenging.

True, but everyone paying for “broadband internet” is paying that premium for the fat pipes to carry video on demand.

The communication, socialization and creation space might use less than 10% of the bandwidth, less than 0.1% if you take video out of it.

Depends on how you measure things. If you pie-chart the internet by bandwidth used, most of it is currently used for TV 2.0 (streaming video, mostly by subscription.)

Smaller communities don’t get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don’t cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.