Very low traction on these. Let me know when there’s something that people actually use in tens or hundreds of millions and random people are just providing the infrastructure out of pocket and spending all their time on this without expectation.
Hosting millions of users is very cheap (less than 200$ per month).
Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.
At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time.
Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth required.
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.