Post #4854281 · Elektrine

2026-09-26 04:11 UTC

I want the #Fediverse to grow. But out of curiosity, how well would the Fediverse scale? What would happen if the current user base increased by a factor of 10, 100, or 1000? And if the answer is "bad things", what would need to be done to make the Fediverse cope with such an expanded user base? (For the purpose of this thought exercise, assume that each specific Fediverse software implementation would likewise multiply their user base by this factor, albeit spread out over more instances.) #FediHelp

Replies (1)

@skeyby@punk.kitchen 2026-09-26 09:57

@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social My opinion is that there is one huge gap at the moment, that is a cross instance search capability da could allow you to search an hashtag across the fediverse even if the content was not on your node. That forces ever instance owner to join relay and have a local copy of huge amount of data nobody will ever see just because someone someday might search for it. That is the part that doesn’t scale well. On the contrary if one could cross search, he would find an interesting account to follow even if it was in remote side of the world and could start to follow it. So the question is not “does the distributed model scale well”, the question is “do the relay that keep everything aligned scale well?” I have already seen big instances with a lot of active users dropping relays simply because the ratio between useful storage/users works best for them without actual federation duplicating post in a different language or on totally different topics than their focus.

Open ##4854276