[jscottmiller]

That's a fair criticism - this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. What I find interesting about this is the cost of running the service. Being able to run a twitter-like thing on a hundred or so large aws instances is neat and I'm sure that many folks here dream of that kind of efficiency at their day jobs, but I'm more excited about how this scales down. Can you run a community of a thousand or so posters on a micro or nano instance for a few bucks a month or less? At that scale and cost, donations should easily be able to cover hosting fees and you would surely be able to deputize enough mods to keep things civil (for whatever definition of civil your instance lands on). Ads, monetization, personalization are non-issues (well, not major issues) at that scale.