traffic volume is already a serious consideration, but theroetically its what you request. its not like an instance comes up and suddenly needs to interact with 500 other servers.

if you on your personal instance decide you need to subscribe to thousands of communities on thousands of servers... isnt that kinda on you? i mean.. how could you personally ever expect to consume that volume?

if youre on a community instance and the instance itself is drawing a metric fuckton of traffic.. scale up. the good platforms will scale.

that said, ive kinda tried to sub to every server i can find just for giggles... it 'pre-loads' the content on my instant for new users in the 'newest' queues.

there are mitigations you can put in place for rate-limiting other servers also.. your server would just fall farther and farther behind

personally, i think it scales better than other options. bluesky doesnt scale at all