Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

Twitter gives people who want to micro-publish to many millions of people very easily a place to do that. Of course, since Twitter stopped providing simple reverse-chronological feeds, it's unclear how many people would actually ever see a given post in their timeline as it was posted, rather than quote-tweets or external links directly to the tweet web page, but point taken. It is possible--although by no means certain--that the fediverse is incapable of handling that particular use case.

You asked about email, I'll counter with actual message services. For reasons clear only to the people involved, I have contacts I can only reach via Signal, or via WhatsApp, or via Telegram, or via WeChat, or via Discord, or via Slack, and so on. How do I cope with this? I just do. Similarly, if I had to visit eight different web pages to track my favorite super-popular people, I just would. Or I'd do what I actually do, and follow almost none of them, instead letting people who are terminally online quote and link to the ones worth knowing about.

If ActivityPub filled up, and couldn't take on any more users, then I would first expect technical solutions like a sharp rise in relay servers, which combine the output of many servers into one outbox to be polled. After that, assuming there was some sort of hard limit that couldn't be overcome that way, I would expect that I would need to create a new account on some other ActivityPub-like network, or even a separate unfederated network also running ActivityPub. My chosen client (Mastonaut) can already support multiple ActivityPub accounts on different servers, so my experience would likely remain the same.

You initially suggested that the Fediverse can't scale. It's worth noting that Twitter itself fell apart long before it reached anything like today's mastodon numbers, and the "Fail Whale" was a constant companion in 2008, when Twitter had only one million users, 200k of which were active per week[0]. So already ActivityPub is scaling better across the network than Twitter itself once did all by itself. Maybe Mastodon (Ruby on Rails) will fade over time, replaced by something written in a more efficient language (like Twitter was). Maybe ActivityPub itself will be converted to use thrift or grpc or similar. Maybe ActivityPub can support 100 million users just fine. It seems to have handled going from 300K monthly active users to 2.5 million monthly active users without trouble[1].

The total Fediverse seems to have more than 8 million total users now. I guess we might find out.

0. https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/29/end-of-speculation-the-rea...

1. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/twitter-suspends-masto...

what's interesting about Reddit is that moderation is (in theory) decentralized and handled independently by each sub. Only account creation and discovery are centralized, from the perspective of an average user experience. The whole point of a federated system is that you get the best of both worlds: global discovery and one single account/login for all communities, but you retain per-community moderation.

Of course; that's why I posted it.

> The point is that people went from an experience where they didn't take money out of their pocket every month unless they wanted to, and didn't have to curate for others or moderate for others.

That was basically a vivid hallucination. You offshored the mod work to underpaid contractors in foreign offices and paid by selling your focus and privacy. You didn't have to feel guilty because some nice folks in fancy clothes with a big PR department told you it was cool.

Those folks in the fancy suits are realizing it's too hard to make money that way.

You can still chase that bargain. You will see more and more ads. Your privacy will only get more invaded. Eventually you will have to pay.