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.

This. I'm not really an anarchist but I say that while anarchists are a minority here the non-sectarianism rules shouldn't apply to them. Let them run hog-wild.

you're an admin, be the change you wanna see. do what I've been suggesting forever now, keep tendency specific posts to tendency specific channels, and keep the main and default channels relatively tendency agnostic. like, posts about chinas biquarterly GDP growth should be in c/sino instead of getting 8000 upvotes on c/main. or like, last time i signed in some post about how awful r/anarchism was on the_dunk_tank with 100 upvotes. like either just officially make it an ML site, or moderate it as a left unity platform bc you can't do both.

end rant. sorry if that was rude its just so annoying to me lol.

also why'd you just unban fed when they were banned for transphobia I thought we were trying to not unban ppl for that anymore