Some people love saying Mastodon/OStatus is very scalable because of federation but let's be honest that's some bullshit. It's easy to split and multiply, but that's not scaling.
The birdsite is much easier to scale.
Just imagine one edge case we're not seeing for now: many people using it (let's say millions) and following a very famous person
That person must have their own instance at this point, at least.
... what happens when they toot?
just imagine the enormous peaks and lag it'll do. And we're not even talking about media.
How would Mastodon realistically handle Katy Perry? I have no idea.
@CobaltVelvet the only advantage of a federation would be summarization of traffic between instances, just like in multicast - one update to one instance instead of 1000s of updates for every instance's user
