Universities running protocol nodes — TU Dortmund, TU Dresden, MIT SIPB, Tor relays at 45+

Universities are already running protocol nodes as routine background operations, with no published study measuring their incremental cost — because the costs have apparently not been significant enough to track.

• TU Dortmund Fachschaft Informatik operates a Matrix homeserver (matrix.fachschaften.org) for university-wide messaging in the university's own data center, run by student volunteers (S-0100).
• TU Dresden runs Matrix for 18,000 users on existing IT staff and student assistants (S-0101).
• MIT runs both a Mastodon instance and a Forgejo Git forge through its Student Information Processing Board, on existing server hardware, at effectively zero cost to the university (S-0102).
• Over 45 universities run Tor relays as background processes requiring near-zero maintenance (S-0098).
• Academic Torrents distributes over 298 terabytes of research data across volunteer seeders at zero central infrastructure cost (S-0097).

The cases demonstrate that institutional Tier 3 deployment is not theoretical. It is operationally trivial in practice — a fact pattern that can be referenced as the existence proof for R2 (deploy at least one protocol-level preservation node).