

It’s not and if anything the fact it’s small has advantages. Small is easier to turn into an echo chamber.
If you can push bullshit onto a small but passionate group of people online they’ll do all the hard work for you. They’ll recruit, polish/tailor the message for other audiences, and spread it across the wider internet.
And we know it works, because that’s exactly how the whole “Q-anon” thing operated. Some vague, crazy bullshit on an obscure imageboard became a nearly mainstream “movement”.
Every city in the western world already has at least one rack of servers running 24/7. The have their own domain names, they have a web presence, etc – running a mastodon instance on existing infrastructure hardly qualifies as wasteful.