Especially if I can see just from the scale and price that it's not cost-optimized, they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization, just throwing money at the problem is no longer there.

Comparing your small-scale service to that is dishonest.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization,

Read again, because it seems you are refusing to understand.

Optimizing the hardware/server part is completely irrelevant. The operational costs are less than 3 cents per user, it's the labor of the people working there that is going unaccounted.

your small-scale service

You are going at this backwards. My service is "small scale" because most people are still expecting to have social media offered to them for free, or at best they think that the labor should be free and that the only thing "worth to be paid for" is the server. And because there are still so many people who are willing to run instances for fun/as a hobby, they are effectively pricing their own work at zero dollars, and then of course others will flock to those instances.

So, yes, of course we can not compare my service with the larger instances, because these instances are effectively operating at a loss and they just don't care about it.