The real test of how likely Mastodon can replace a centralized service like Twitter will be when v4 of Mastodon is officially released (currently, it is in a release candidate stage which is after beta but not quite ready for the official release). One of the major tradeoffs with federation is always fragmentation. How well do servers keep up to date? Will this make a difference to users?
I definitely don't have answers but I think that this will be the first truly big test of the #fediverse
@mcneely that post about how much much processing work goes into making sure one single toot and its replies/likes displays on everyone else's different instances made me a bit worried, to be honest. I hadn't stopped to think about how resource intensive the Fediverse is!
It has hurt my hope of it being this widely used for longer than a couple months, to be honest. Not sure people will have the willpower to go through instance migrations and whatnot once a lot inevitably shut down.
@fantinel I'm guessing you mean Aral's post from the other day about costs? That was basically the one that has me pumping the brakes on self hosting my instance.
I expect that monetary reasons are going to start being a limiting factor here for size very shortly.
