Looking at the Linked Instances, most instances have at most a few hundred instances linked. What happens when there are thousands, or possibly even millions? Could too many instances require significantly more powerful hardware, or even be impossible altogether?
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
rimu@piefed.social 2 hours ago
It’s complicated.
You could federate with millions of instances if the people using them are not doing very much. But a handful of instances could theoretically overwhelm the whole network if they had malicious bots spamming like crazy.
The instance that hosts a community is responsible for sending copies of everything to all following instances, so most of the load is on those instances that host lots of popular communities. All other instances just need to be powerful enough to keep up with what they receive, which is 100x less work.
So even more important than spreading users out among instances, is spreading communities out among instances. Communities cause most of the load.