Phileosopher

It's the emergence of a new community. When things get big, people feel less individually responsible, and that's how trouble starts.

That really depends on which philosophy you subscribe to.

The TL;DR is that existential and post-modern philosophy say it's varying degrees of relative, while everything anyone said before ~1800 was saying that facts were immutable.

One fact I can glean is that the data itself may be real (e.g., the wavelengths of light that hit your eyeballs) but the perception is a composite illusion of our mind (e.g., the fact that you just saw a kitty).

You're forgetting the future stages:

• holy crap! im autistic
• hey everyone, im autistic
• okay, i guess it just explains everything
• nobody seems to care that much
• alright, i'll go find a good-paying tech/accounting/science job now
• proud to be ASD, if anyone cares

You'll always have to rely on someone else, unless you build the thing yourself.

The beauty of the fediverse concept is that it's about as easy as possible to build it yourself.

The cost of running a host is a matter of economical management:

• It costs almost nil to run text-based content.
• Images take a bit of memory and bandwidth, but are even manageable with an old cellphone under a set number of users.
• Videos are a major drag, and very expensive unless you're embedding them.

Most open-source is funded as passion projects by devoted geeks who typically already make a living doing other computer things anyway, and fediverse is a bit of the same.