@lain @fluffy @cyber_ruffy @foxhkron @realcaseyrollins I think they meant it's "expensive" in the sense that they kept breaking shit and people were expecting them to fix it, and "time is money." But working with them, I saw a lot of slacking off, lack of focus and poor planning.
They also moved to new servers recently, and faced challenges migrating Mastodon:
1. The database. Millions of RSA keypairs making it extremely slow to export, copy, and import.
2. Media uploads. Terabytes of remote image uploads containing content Gab users will likely never see.
What they don't understand is that Mastodon isn't ActivityPub, and you can have a server without storing remote media. The RSA keypair issue is legitimate, but maybe they should have planned for this instead of just reacting when something goes wrong. I was able to omit keypairs from my Migrator, making the export about 300x faster (not an exaggeration).
I strongly believe they ended federation because they felt someone deserved to be "punished" for this. They refuse to punish themselves, so removing federation is like a way to "punish" Mastodon for their site being down for 4 days.