I wonder if people will ever go back to Diaspora and host their own pods. For about $40/month you can host up to about 1,500 users. I did it for a little while on a basic package for like $15/month and the directions to install are fairly straight forward and the community is really helpful.

The issue I ran into wasn't cost of hosting, it was getting people to move off whatever platform they were already on - regardless of how much better it was for controlling their own data and privacy.

These platforms are doing something wildly more exotic than I imagined. 1500 clients?! You could have hosted larger crowds in IRC with 90s hardware.