On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
Doesn’t sound too insane except for the social contributions tracking and realtime dashboard. Maaaaybe all of the social data could somehow magically not end up as a ton of traffic just for metadata, but a realtime dashboard would exponentially exacerbate how much data would have to flow around.
It would be very unwise to make the gamification of financial support end up being a significant % of the overall traffic required to run a service, though I guess as long as it stays a low %, it could be worth it.