Interesting note in the latest fediverse blog post update for Ghost:
Will members who use ActivityPub (rather than email) count toward Ghost(Pro) billing? And so far the answer is yes, because ActivityPub is (quite significantly) more expensive to support than email. But, this is all very early days, and hopefully we’ll figure out ways to get some of the costs and complexity down.
If I’m reading this correctly and the pricing holds, that effectively means you will pay more for hosting if you have lots of followers on the fediverse. This would be a first; I’ve never heard of a social network charging for followers before.
So if you’re using the $11/month Ghost hosting that allows 500 members, you could have (for example) 100 email subscribers and 400 followers in the fediverse. As soon as you had more subscribers or followers, you would need to bump up to the $19/month plan. If you got up to 10k and more followers, you would be paying hundreds of dollars a month.
Of course this is all beta and as Ghost further optimizes it, the pricing could change. It comes from Ghost’s early testing that showed how resource-intensive ActivityPub is. I can definitely attest to that with Micro.blog as well.
