Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a nice thought, but reality is always different. A really popular person might have many millions of followers on tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes. That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image. You can say that a single user should not have that many followers, however the roo…
Yes, and we're already seeing it e.g. with https://mas.to getting hugged to death because of pg joining it. If anything, it can be treated as a technological problem, solvable e.g. by (theorizing now) splitting a single instance over a series of machines, or a social problem, by (not theorizing anymore) a famous enough person hosting their own instance as already suggested several times on the Fediverse. The Fedivers…
So if the likes Obama or Stephen King want to move over to Mastodon their barrier of entry would be to complete this laundry list [1] or find a service that does this for them? Given that they own the instance, they would also need to provide moderation for it.
I don't disagree that there are solutions to the scale problem. What I have trouble seeing are solutions that are viable. That's the thing about a centralized service--you have a company that handles all of this so your users don't have to.
[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want...