Like I said in my comment, the "business side of things" (i.e. the infrastructure to support ads, spying, control) are what makes it non-trivial. You can't use "making money is hard" as an argument against me saying that it's so cheap a hobbyist could do it for fun.
Hosting a forum that gets the traffic Reddit does at higher availability than Reddit does (Reddit returns error pages all the time) is absolutely trivial on modern hardware (except for images/videos, as I said). I've known several people that have unmetered connections/servers in datacenters as a hobby.
The entire history of every text post/comment ever on that site could fit on 2-3 SSDs now. The traffic is nothing. It doesn't take a lot to host a site that can fit on one computer with plenty of room to spare.
Hosting a forum that gets the traffic Reddit does at higher availability than Reddit does (Reddit returns error pages all the time) is absolutely trivial on modern hardware (except for images/videos, as I said). I've known several people that have unmetered connections/servers in datacenters as a hobby.
The entire history of every text post/comment ever on that site could fit on 2-3 SSDs now. The traffic is nothing. It doesn't take a lot to host a site that can fit on one computer with plenty of room to spare.