[kaibee]

Storage/compute/etc were orders of magnitude more expensive at the time, so the fact that it was 3-4 million is uh, pretty impressive? You could host a Matrix server for your 1,000 closest friends for basically no money.

[andsoitis]

You're absolutely right compute, network, and storage have continued to decrease in cost and accessibility.

The scale issue is enabling billions of consumers. It takes time and effort and skill.

It turns out that there are relatively skilled people who are willing to give their time and resources freely relative to billions of consumers in the market.

[foxygen]

You know IRC isn't just one giant server serving every single user, right? Same for Mastodon. There were/are many different servers. Again, you are arguing against reality. IRCs/Forums have existed for decades, with hundreds of thousands of active users, with no problem whatsover. Scaling to billions is easy, since with more people using it, more people would be interested in hosting a server.