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 Isn't that simply a toot being distributed then to "all" Mastodon servers? Why would that produce such a problem?
@CobaltVelvet True. I imagine if there's a future where Mastodon is a big enough player that it's an "alternative to Twitter" where Katy Perry is here, there are going to be a few gigantic instances that are popular, and then a ton of smaller instances.
@codydh @CobaltVelvet Hrm.... Actually, I think you're right. The /toot/ is distributed, but /not/ the distrubtion list. Which makes my previous comment irrelevant. It /does/ mean, though, that brands on Mastodon might lose some of the concept of "follower". As it is they lose much of the tracking and ID that's associated with FB, less so on Twitter.
Another bonus of Mastodon: you're not tracked all over the damned Web by your social channel.
@codydh Still if we imagine migrating all birdsite to Mastodon servers without having too large instances, it's enormous