I resent the "not too sharp" comment, and the implication that I hadn't even considered the idea that you're paying with your data coming from all three of you.

I'll respond here to all of you that responded generally with "you pay with your data, it's not free."

Ok fine, but you don't know what you're paying with on Mastodon, because you have no idea what any one node might do with your data, because there is no centralized privacy policy. Not a problem, I'm sure you read the privacy policy of every website you join right?

I'm also not sure why you assume a free, ad-based Mastodon service wouldn't exist as the network scaled.

The network has like 100k active users. It's very much in 'virtue untested' territory.