> It sounds like you're arguing from a hypothetically perfect view with 20/20 hindsight.
I'm just stating the obvious, which is that whether a service is centralized or federated has nothing to do with it. Mastodon would melt long before operating at Twitter scale, for example. (And to your points, I don't think that's necessarily bad.)
But, if there's any company on earth that should have 20/20 hindsight about this, it's Twitter. Post-"fail whale" era and pre-Musk, the service weathered far larger challenges without collapsing.
It probably would, but Mastodon is now at around 13M accounts, but with ca. 3x as many instances as when it hit 10M, so it's increasingly better prepared for large user surges.
E.g. signups have hit ~6x what they were earlier today but it's still only an average of one signup per instance per hour.
Great! I’m a fan and I hope Mastodon/ActivityPub continues to grow. I just wish it wasn’t prohibitively complex/expensive to host an instance with a few thousand members.
I think Mastodon will continue to be expensive to host, as the way it's engineered is not well suited to cut costs, but I also think we'll see a lot of innovation in "slimmer" services that will be "Mastodon-compatible enough" but lighter weight. Ideally we'll eventually see some sort of standardisation of a client-server API (rather than just depending on people ad-hoc reimplementing Mastodons API), but that may take longer.
I'm just stating the obvious, which is that whether a service is centralized or federated has nothing to do with it. Mastodon would melt long before operating at Twitter scale, for example. (And to your points, I don't think that's necessarily bad.)
But, if there's any company on earth that should have 20/20 hindsight about this, it's Twitter. Post-"fail whale" era and pre-Musk, the service weathered far larger challenges without collapsing.