>According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance will cost me ~$90+taxes/month
How efficient is the usenet protocol? I would expect that it would require far less resources.
What's the technical reason for not using the usenet protocol for a federated social network?
-no way to moderate content. you may see this as good or bad, but spam can be annoying. it'd probably be a lot worse us it became more mainstream.
-costs due to bandwidth if you are part of the infrastructure are driven by people posting binary data, far larger in bytes vs actual text. this is apparently why there are so many paid services.
-no way to authenticate identity
I'm probably missing a couple of items. There are ways to cope with these things, people use this every day, but it's not perfect.