Besides the monetary costs of operating small fora there are also significant competence hurdles. Site owners who manage to hit a couple thousand users have to figure out spam handling, automated content moderation (including photoDNA and the required reporting if they host images), registering a DMCA agent with the copyright office, setting up an LLC, assessing their needs for COPPA, GDPR and CCPA, their site's tax situation and anything they may want to do involving employing others (such as T&S) without getting burnt out. The median size for a forum getting its first subpoena is 4,300 users.
Managing all of that is easily learnable in a couple months if they have time, disposable income and few distractions but surprisingly few people who have site management thrust upon them know about these things in advance. To most people who think about running an internet anything the above are unknown unknowns. You can't go looking for things you don't know exist, so burnout is high.
Citation highly needed. I'm close to quite a few people who run larger instances than that, including my own, and none of them have ever told me about getting subpoenaed. That's exactly the kind of war story we'd tell each other, too.
I've seen no evidence that running a fediverse server is nearly so legally fraught.
I'll go looking for the citation and it may take a couple hours but I'll point out that FWIW my info is drawn from some academic surveying vBulletin and Xenforo site owners in the 2010s so I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't applicable anymore.
No problem. I thought that seemed on the high side but didn’t have any stats to counter with. Which paper does 430k come from? I’d like to squirrel that away for later.
Managing all of that is easily learnable in a couple months if they have time, disposable income and few distractions but surprisingly few people who have site management thrust upon them know about these things in advance. To most people who think about running an internet anything the above are unknown unknowns. You can't go looking for things you don't know exist, so burnout is high.