We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.
(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)
Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.
Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.
I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.
@aral Exactly. Fediverse is meant to scale horizontally.
This small instance I’m on (<800 users) was unaffected by performance issues during the Twitter exodus, which is the whole point of federation.
@dubiousdisc @aral I have never seen anyone else with the same server as me and I'm wondering who the hell else is here since I've never been able to load a local timeline 😐
