*Hypothesis*
If:
- We follow more frequently than unfollow and
- User growth stagnates
Then:
Eventually any person on one instance is followed by at least one person on any other instance and all federated timelines become largely the same and contain all toots, except for some blocks.
➡️ Am I missing something or is federation going to blow up and eat server resources like mad?
@sysadmin1138 that seems likely to me too, because the admins that are good at raising funds will have the chance to keep scaling up.
Ah but of course on a small niche instance, not all 10000s of users get a follow by any of the users.
The issue would only occur at the large instances and maybe even slow down growth a bit!
@koos OtherNet people have remarked on how UseNetty this is looking. I knew people managing news-spools back in the day, and that took engineering. There was some divergence between servers; but mostly the difference was in which newsgroups were carried and how long they were retained.
That ended up with a few large providers, and hobby spools for small groups.
@sysadmin1138 that makes the current situation extra special! Curious to see where it will go.
Makes me also think I should not have signed up at an instance that is relatively big already - the current size of a couple 1000s feels good right now.
@koos If this does actually take off, I expect some companies to step in and apply some adopt-and-extend magic to monitize it and encourage centralization.
@sysadmin1138 email would be the equivalent with quite a few big providers and a very long tail of smaller ones. Doesn't sound too bad! Except that I would probably not use the Gmail equivalent of Mastodon although it has the best features and UI :-/
@koos I am interested in the answer to this question, will be following this thread.
@koos I expect things to converge on a few monster instances, and constellation of hobby, niche, and individual instances. Most users will be concentrated in a few places, the ones equipped to handle the firehose.