The most interesting thing about the Cohost financials is, to me, that the technology costs are a mere ~20% of the overall costs (and with salaries that are below-normal for tech).

It's super tempting for us as engineers to think about more efficient protocols or tech... but even perfectly efficient ones wouldn't even make a dent in cohost's financial issues.

...and Mastodon only really "avoids" this by trading salary for instance admin burnout, IMO.

(see: https://cohost.org/staff/post/1690393-h1-2023-financial-up)