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I think the cost would be kinda negligible next to the labor in administration and maintenance. You can rent a VPS for 5-10 dollars a month and a domain for 10-20 dollars a year. Unless your website really takes off, it will cost less to host it than it does just to have internet access at your home. The challenge is assembling a multidisciplinary team of trustworthy people to share in the maintenance efforts. Updating software on the server, making backups, fixing things when they break, etc. What Beatnik did well was getting everyone into the same place to work on a common goal.
Since the days we got Chapo.chat off the ground though, both Lemmy and Hexbear have only gotten better. The challenges to launching a new instance are much smaller today thanks to the work everyone put in.
