Yeah but if you need to pay sats to an ASIC provider, why not just pay them to the relay directly instead?
To me the beauty of PoW based social media is that people wouldn't even need to "pay", it could be a "free" but still quality experience like current social media is.
Of course, everything needs to be paid for one way or another, but paying with your CPU cycles could perhaps be a more seamless experience than sats, on some scenarios.