Minus the foreign money laundering/bribery and fanatic cult driving up the valuation, what do you think it's actually worth? $200 mil? I am giving it a generous 50x multiple on revenue.
The entire Mastodon project including two instances (mastodon.social + mastodon.online) with about 1/3 the users between them runs on a $22k/month Patreon. And it is a fork of Mastodon, so that's a good comparison.
This shows it's not the software or platform that matters- it's the network effect of who is using it.
It does. Billions of dollars and it can't even match a network run mostly by volunteers funded on donations with software they got for free.